S,T, 'S IMAGE OF THE GROWTH OF THE MIND AS RELATED TO ART AND EXEMPLIFIED IN HIS POETRY

A Thesis submitted for the degree

of Master of Arts at the University

of New South Wales, 'July, 1976,

by Kate Gadman. I declare that this thesis has not been submitted for a degree or similar award to any other

University or Institution.

Signed: A SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT

As a young poet Coleridge was attracted by the logic and shape of David Hartley's associationist psychology but he grew to suspect that individuality is the precondition rather than the product of development.

Eventually he combined conceivable structure with enigmatic potential in the image of the growing vegetable organism.

When this image is applied descriptively to abstract psycholo­ gical movement, the seed symbolizes an antecedent principle whose self­ development incorporates free-will and self-consciousness in a process of progressive metamorphosis. The mentality and learning method of the child exemplify this conception. Coleridge envisages a hierarchy in which the highest activities of mind, 'will', 'reason' and 'imagination', constitute

'nodes', or transitional experiences in the upward expansion of growth.

Coleridge relates a theory of art to the structure of thought.

The artefact grows out of conscious and unconscious assimilative processes, emerging in symbols of both contextual and numinous significance. Thus the value of the work is not only in its autonomous entity but is also a quality of the organic experience by which it is apprehended.

Coleridge's own early poetry moves towards 'organic' art, where the work absorbs and recreates the processes of mental growth by which it is produced. '' and The Ancient Mariner most notably employ special techniques of structure and symbolism to effect the reader's participation in psychological experiences.

i A NOTE ON TEXTS The following list contains the texts of Coleridge's works consulted. Abbreviations are given for those editions from which quotations have been taken.

AP Anima Poetae: From the Unpublished Notebooks of . Edited by Ernest . London: William Heinemann, 1895.

AR Aids to Reflection and The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit: to which are added His Essays on Faith and the Book of Common Prayer, etc. Bohn's Standard Library edition. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1884.

Aids to Reflection. Edited by . 6th edition. London: William Pickering, 1848.

Allsop Letters, conversations and recollections of S.T. Coleridge. Edited by Thomas Allsop. 2nd edition. London: Groombridge and Sons, 1858.

BL . Edited with his aesthetical essays by J. Shawcross. 2 vols. Revised edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. [1st pub. 1907]

Biographia Literaria: or Biographical Sketches of my literary life and opinions. Edited with an introduction by George Watson. Everyman's Library edition. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1956.

CL Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Earl L. Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956-1971.

Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century. Edited by Roberta F. Brinkeley with an introduction by Louis I. Bredvold. London: Cambridge University Press, 1955.

Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism. Edited by Thomas M. Raysor. Folcroft, Pennsylvania: Folcroft Press, 1969. [1st pub. 1936]

ii Friend The Friend. Edited by Barbara E. Rooke. 2 vols. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 4. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969.

IS Inquiring Spirit: A New Presentation of Coleridge from his Published and Unpublished Prose Writings. Edited by Kathleen Coburn. New York: Pantheon Books, 1951. [Entries cited by page]

JDC The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited with a biographical introduction by James Dykes Campbell. London: Macmillan and Company, 1905. [1st pub. 1893]

rr JJJJ Coleridge on Logic and Learning: with selections from the unpublished manuscripts. Edited by Alice D. Snyder. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929.

LPR Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion. Edited by Lewis Patton and Peter Mann. The Complete works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971.

LS Lay Sermons. Edited by R.J. White. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 6. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 19 71.

Miscellanies Miscellanies Aesthetic and Literary: to which is added The Theory of Life. Collected and arranged by T. Ashe, B.A. Bohn's Standard Library edition. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1885.

Notebooks The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Kathleen Coburn. 3 vols. New York: Pantheon Books, 1957 - [Entries cited by number]

PW The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge including poems and versions of poems now published for

iii the tirst time. Edited with textual and bibliographical notes by . 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. [1st pub. 1912]

SC Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism. Edited by T.M. Raysor. 2 vols. Revised Everyman' s Library edition. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1965. [1st pub. 1930]

TL "Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life." In Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge. Edited with an introduction by Donald A. Stauffer. Modern Library edition. New York: Random House, 1951.

TM S.T. Coleridge's Treatise on Method as published in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. Edited with an introduction, manuscript fragments and notes for a complete collation with the essays on method in The Friend, by Alice D. Snyder. London: Constable and Company, 1934.

TT The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: with additional Table Talk from Allsop's "Recollections", and manuscript matter not before printed. Arranged and edited by T. Ashe, B.A. Bohn's Standard Library edition. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1888. [Entries cited by date]

The friend: a series of essays to aid in the formation of fixed principles in politics, morals, and religion, with literary amusements interspersed. 3rd edition with the author's last corrections and an appendix, and with a synoptical table of the contents of the work, by Henry Nelson Coleridge. London: William Pickering, 1837.

The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Hitherto Unpublished. Edited by Kathleen Coburn. London: Pilot Press, 1949.

iv CONTENTS

Page

A Summary of the Argument i

A Note on Texts ii

CHAPTER I Introduction 1

CHAPTER II From Clockwork Necessity to Freedom and Metamorphosis 12

CHAPTER III Mind as Organism 34

CHAPTER IV Nodes of Growth: Will, Reason, Imagination 63

CHAPTER V The Mind and Art 94

CHAPTER VI The Poetry of Growth 128

CHAPTER VII Organic Poetry: A Summary 182

SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY 191

V CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION In 1967 Basil Willey made the comment that there must seem to be little excuse for writing a book on Coleridge when to do so means simply to cover areas which have already been well discussed, using material which has been long available to eve:r:yone. 1 The same is obviously true of my discussion here, and I can only follow Basil

Willey' s own argument and 'excuse it on personal grounds' • So much has been written on Coleridge in recent years2 with, as Willey points out, so much to come from the study of newly published works, that further reworking of familiar material may seem superfluous. Never- theless, the 'excuse' which so readily demands a voice, carries with it its own justification. Coleridge is not only a man for all time but he is also a man for all men; his writings are at once personal and universal and, as such, they have an enormous amount to offer the individual who may find, in his turn, that he has something personal and perhaps relevant to say about what he has learned. My own reasons

for working on Coleridge have become clearer as the work has proceeded and amount simply to the fact that I have learned more about 'thought' and about 'how to think' as a result of thinking about Coleridge, than

from the whole of my previous education. And Basil Willey' s comments would suggest that my experience is not completely idiosyncratic, that perhaps the constantly recurring desire to write about Coleridge 'on pe.rsonal grounds' promises a continuous process of learning and re-

learning which is distinctly profitable to an understanding of human

nature.

1 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1972), p.ix. 2 I am thinking in.particular of works such as J.A. Appleyard, Coleridge's Philosophy of Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), OWen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (London, 1972) and Thomas McFarland, Coleridge ~he Pantheist Tradition (Oxford, 1969), all of which analyse the major pre­ mises of Coleridge's thought in considerably more detail and with much greater philosophical acumen and learning than I could do here.

1 In the following discussion I have tried to give a brief

exegesis of what has been widely agreed to be a fundamental aspect

of Coleridge's total philosophy, the development, or 'growth', of

mind. My aim has been to bring together in simple form the central

concepts of Coleridge's psychology to show their relation to each

other as parts to a whole, the whole being the growing organism, the

mind. An interesting example of the primacy which Coleridge accorded

to the study of psychology on morphological principles is found in a

note he made on Dr. Gillman's copy of The Statesman's Manual in which

he suggests that his own works exemplify 'the gradual Evolution of the

Mind of the World, contemplated as a single mind in the different suc­

cessive stages of its development'. 3 The growth of the individual mind

in 'successive stages' is characteristic of Coleridge's theory and its

being seen by extension to reflect 'the gradual Evolution of the Mind

of the World' suggests that his conclusions are not without some theo­

retical framework. Coleridge himself did not examine his ideas logi­

cally or systematically, nor did he clarify the conceptual framework

upon which he was building a philosophy of mind, and of life. I have

tried to make a simple reconstruction of this framework and to relate

it to Coleridge's mature ideas about the nature of art and to some of

his best poetry.

The problems incurred by the erratic organization and style

.of Coleridge's prose are frequently exposed in a study of this kind,

though most favourable commentators agree with Basil Willey who points

out that, appropriately, for Coleridge 'to be at his best, his mind

3 IS.• p. 202 •

2 must be in action and growth' 4 and thus his best can only be achieved at the expense of systematic organization. Because Coleridge's philo­ sophy is an amalgam of emphases derived from spontaneous responses to all kinds of experience (including his reading), its central tenets are blurred, inconclusive and occasionally not original. Their value lies, as Richard Haven has observed, in that they look for support to genuine. h uman experience.. 5 In this their veracity is remarkable.

With respect to Coleridge's work in psychology, however, value is not restricted to insight; there is an internal consistency though it is not the consistency of logic. The basic pattern of thought is best understood in terms of a conceptual construction, an image, which emerges in greater detail the more the dominant emphases are exposed.

By means of an image the shape and value of a wide range of mental ex­ periences can be organized for examination without the necessity for logical or systematic thinking or for the negation of the emotional context.

I have begun my examination of Coleridge's psychology with the work of David Hartley and in my first chapter I have given a brief outline of Coleridge's early views in an area of thought already well worked by commentators such as Stephen Prickett, James Baker, J.A.

Appleyard and others. 6 In Hartley's theory of mental development

4 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p.179. A good assessment of the debate about Coleridge• s consistency is contained in Thomas McFarland's introduc­ tion to Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, op.cit., pp.xxiii-xl. For other favourable comments see Stephen Prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth (London, 1970), pp.176ff and Herbert Read, "Coleridge the Critic," The True Voice of Feeling (1947; rpt. London, 1968), pp.157-160. 5 Patterns of Consciousness (Amherst, 1969), p.12. 6 See Prickett, "Mechanism versus Organism," op.cit., pp.46-70; James Volant Baker, "Organism and the Machine," The Sacred River (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1957), pp.40-112; J.A. Appleyard, op.cit., pp.176- 188. An earlier relevant, though largely superseded, article is by S.F. Gingerich, "From Necessity to Transcendentalism in Coleridge," PMLA, 28(1920), pp.1-59.

3 structure is one of the most important elements. He posited a carefully ordered hierarchy of psychological states bound together by mechanical association and giving rise to the concept of 'Neces­ sity'. Coleridge's self-analysis led him eventually to suspect this doctrine of association as not taking sufficient account of the con- tributions of self-consciousness and emotion to the thought process.

When Coleridge began to reject Hartley's theory it was on emotional grounds in defence of his own intrinsic individuality and in order to preserve the mystery of personality. In the slow process of re- consideration he came to replace the structure of mechanical move­ ment (as of 'so many differently coloured billiard-balls in contact') 7 with a structure which embodied the motion of continual metamorphosis.

This was provided by the image of the growing organism. As Coleridge extended his use of this image it served to deny 'Necessity' by its peculiar union of potentiality, stimulus and emergent free will. In my analysis of the poet's concept of the organic growth of the mind,

I have tried to show how the image answered for Coleridge some of the problems which trouble his critics, most notably that of organic self­ consciousness. Further, to stress the precision and sensitivity of

Coleridge's experimental analyses of mental growth, I have included a short related discussion on his attitude to children and their growth to intelligent self-knowledge. In an important article entitled

"Coleridge and the Growth of the Mind", 8 Dorothy Emmet makes the salient point that Coleridge's philosophy was based on observation as

7 BL, I, 75. 8 In Coleridge: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967), pp. 161-178. In the course of my discussion I have referred to several essays in this very good col­ lection, hereafter cited as Twentieth Century Views.

4 well as introspection (p.164), not an insignificant part of which was the observation of his own young children. Finally, in recon­ structing the pattern of Coleridge's thinking, I have felt it ne­ cessary to mention his motivation, which was always profoundly reli­ gious. Since my own bias is psychological, however, I have not chosen to examine Coleridge's religious convictions at all; it simply needs me to remark that the image of organic growth offered him the possibility of eventual union with God through expanding self-reali­ zation and increasing interpenetration with the world of nature.

One aspect that I have chosen to emphasise in this exegesis is the detail with which Coleridge explored the nature of mental ope­ rations along the principles of morphogenesis laid down by the image.

The growth structure gives rise to a hierarchy of mental processes whereby increased value is ascribed to increased refinement of activi­ ty. In particular I have pointed to Coleridge's respect for the con­ tributions of both conscious and unconscious detennination in the psychic event. He organised what he believed to be the highest forms of mental activity into a schema uniting three main operational con­ cepts, the 'will', the 'reason' and the 'imagination', and I have dis­

cussed his definitions of these faculties in the light of problems posed by their organicism. Coleridge relied on faculty psychology for the purposes of description but he believed that, at its most intense, mental growth becomes a process of unification in which all points on

the hierarchical scale are dissolved. In respect to this,the image of

organicism remains useful where descriptive analysis is inadequate.

He also used the image as a model for psychological creativity, that is,

the mind's productivity as extension of its activity, in the spheres of

his particular interest, art and poetry. In the mind as in nature,

5 greatest growth involves greatest productivity, as products are them­ selves growth-sponsoring. In this way the mind of the creator is ne­ cessarily involved in a created artefact. I have therefore considered in some detail Coleridge's view of the complexity of creative mental activity before giving an outline of the nature of its best product.

Coleridge implicated value with organicism (the exhibition of 'Life' as opposed to mechanism and 'Death') even with respect to the charac­ teristic lifelessness of the work of art. He reconciled the paradox in his concept of the 'Symbol' which achieves the containment of vita­ lity in a fixed structure and is the product of the mind' s highest and most intense activity of self-fulfilment in the growth to form.

Finally I have chosen to exemplify Coleridge's theory of the organic nature of art by an examination of some of his own poetry. In a scientific context he once described artistic creativity as a 'cha- racteristic tendency ad extra, which ••• manifests and expands itself ••• in the construction of works completely detached and inorganic.' 9 In this light the artefact or poem is seen as a 'thing-in-itself' outside its participation in the mental life of the poet or reader. In his critical theory, however, Coleridge found this viewpoint hard to main- tain because he frequently felt that poetry at its best exhibits the quality and structure of the poet's mental life. 10 This problem first became apparent to him in writing his own poetry. As a poet, however,

9 TL, p.596. 10 Rene Wellek has mentioned Coleridge's frequent desire to 'abolish the distinction between psychic processes and capacities and the finished product, the work of art': see "Coleridge,", A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950; The Romantic Age (London, 1955), p.165. On one occasion Coleridge himself says, 'What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet? that the answer to the one is in­ volved in the solution of the other." (BL , II ,12)

6 he found a solution by developing a personal symbolism whereby he was able to recreate specifically the living processes of his own mind in poetic form. In order to demonstrate the precise nature of Coleridge's achievement as a poet, I have initially presented an outline of his early poetic development. With the help of his friends he gained a respect for simple and natural poetic techniques, especially in the fields of diction and imagery, as complementary to complex mental atti­ tudes. At the same time he continued searching for new ways in which to invest a personal vision with universal validity. One of the ways in which he was to succeed was in the development of a 'conversational' technique which was specifically suited to his poetic aims. Any one of the 'conversation' poems could be used to exemplify, in varying degrees, a poetic founded upon organic growth. For my purposes I have given de­ tailed analysis of 'Frost at Midnight' and of The Rime of the Ancient

Mariner, these being poems of very different kinds of which it might be said that their excellence is specifically related to their power of recreating mental growth organically within the confines of art. Another obvious choice in this context might be Coleridge's 'Dejection: An Ode', but I have not considered it necessary to examine this poem because the immediacy of its biographical reference to the poet makes it less useful to this discussion.

As I have already mentioned, the areas of Coleridge's thought covered by this thesis are well known. In recent years there has been one publication in which the approach is very similar to the one taken here, that is Stephen Prickett' s Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth. 11 In his book Mr. Prickett discusses much of the same material

11 op. ci t. Throughout the discussion I shall refer to this work as Prickett.

7 as myself, and while this thesis is not in any way intended as a reply to his argument, where I am in his debt or where our conclusions differ significantly I have made the appropriate comment. One issue on which we are at variance is, however, worth noting here because it is funda­ mental to this discussion; it centres on Coleridge's lasting satisfac- tion with organicism as a model for psychological creativity. Mr.

Prickett's position may be illustrated by the following quotation:

In excluding Hartleian mechanism and substituting (or rather, selecting) the analogy of organism to explain growth, Coleridge found himself in danger of replacing one mechanism by another. The added concept of 'assimi­ lation' does not alter the fact that the predetermined growth of a plant from its seed fails to allow for an active and originating power in the mind any more than vibratory mechanism. 12

I have argued in contradistinction to this that Coleridge retained the image of the mind's organic growth to self-fulfilment precisely because, as he envisaged it, it did answer the problem of mechanical necessity and it continued to satisfy his emotional demand for individuality of development. I have attempted to show that Coleridge did not view the growth of the plant from the seed as mechanistic. For him the unique­ ness of growth was the effect of the process; it was the uniqueness of the characteristic tendency for growth that was the cause and this was allowed for in the contained mystery of the seed. In the seed

Coleridge symbolises the organising principle which is latent in living matter and which ensures by its particularity that the process of assi­ milation is freshly interpretive for each new creature. I have also argued that Coleridge's use of organicism in respect of mental growth is not strictly analogical. It seems to me that in developing the image, as a model, he relates its qualities directly to mental processes so

12 Prickett, p.64.

8 that it embraces the non-vegetable elements of self-consciousness and emotion. Whereas Mr. Prickett sees Coleridge's primary image of the

growth of self-consciousness as that of 'Reflection' {which for

Coleridge includes transmission) , 13 I would argue that this and other related images are used by Coleridge as ancillary devices to clarify

the concepts he is exploring and that they do not replace the basic one of organicism.

Several other secondary sources have been useful to me in varying degrees throughout the course of study initiated by this thesis.

The bibliography located at the end contains only those books and

articles which are directly related to the subject under consideration

and does not include others such as biographies, contemporary works or

critical appraisals which, though necessary to understanding, are not of immediate relevance. It is fitting, however, that I should mention here my debt to the standard studies of Coleridge's philosophical theo­

ries by I.A. Richards 14 and J.H. Muirhead15 and to discussions which

are closely related to my own such as that by M.H. Abrams on Coleridge's

interpretation of the analogy of vegetable growth,16 that by Gordon

McKenzie which relates Coleridge's organicism to his practical criticism17

and Herbert Read' s essay "The Notion of : Coleridge". 18 In

this context I must also acknowledge the work of Basil Willey whose

books on the background to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 19 as

13 See Prickett, pp.184-199. 14 Coleridge on Imagination (1934; rpt. London, 1962); hereafter cited as Richards. 15 Coleridge as Philosopher (London, 1930). 16 The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1953), pp.156-167; hereafter cited as Abrams. 1 7 Organic Unity in Coleridge (Berkeley, Calif., 1937). 18 op.cit., pp.15-37. 19 The Eighteenth Century Background (1940; rpt. Harl(K)ndsworth, 1965) and Nineteenth Century Studies (1949; rpt. Harl(K)ndsworth, 1969).

9 well as his recent study entitled Samuel Taylor Coleridge20- have been valuable sources of information and illumination. With respect to

Coleridge's poetry I am greatly indebted to Humphrey House's Clark

Lectures21 and to several personal readings of The Ancient Mariner, especia. 11 y those o f E.E. Bostetter, 22 D•. W Har d' 1ng, 2 3 Ri' ehar d Haven 24 and R.P. Warren. 25

For ease of discussion I have thought of Coleridge's work in psychology as dividing roughly into three periods. The first is characterised by his youthful enthusiasm for metaphysical speculation when as a young man he fonned his major allegiance to Hartley's asso­ ciationism. The second period which extended from about 1795 to 1803, saw his gradual maturation and subsequent decline as a poet, when increasing observation and analysis of the cognitive processes within himself led him to adopt the image of the organism. Then his main position with regard to a philosophy of mind may best be represented by a third or 'prose' period lasting from 1809 to 1825. 26 I have

chosen to follow my summary of Coleridge's early viewpoints with an examination of the ideas expressed in the later prose so as to give

as clear as possible an account of his mature vizualization of the

creative process. My final consideration is given to Coleridge's work

as a poet, with greatest stress on the link between the emerging con­

cepts of psychology and the developing skills of the artist. It was

in tenns of the life of the mind that Coleridge conceived philosophi-

20 op.cit. 2 1 Coleridge: The Clark Lectures 1951-1952 (London, 1953); hereafter cited as House. - 22 "The Nightmare World of The Ancient Mariner," in Twentieth Century Views, pp.65-77. 2 3 "The Theme of 'The Ancient Mariner'," in Twentieth Century Views ,pp. 51-64. 2 I+ op. ci t. , pp.18-42. 25 "' The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' : A Poem of Pure Imagination," Selected Essays (1941; rpt. New York, 1958), pp.198-305; hereafter cited as Warren. 26 J.A. Appleyard gives a detailed chronological account of how Coleridge's literary philosophy was developing between the years 1795 and 1819 in Coleridge's Philosophy of Literature, op.cit. 10 cally of art and I have concluded the discussion with a comment on

Coleridge's concept of artistic 'value' as intrinsically embedded in organic growth.

11 CHAPTER II FROM CLOCKWORK NECESSITY TO FREEDOM AND METAMORPHOSIS Coleridge was born at the end of an era famous for its interest in the physical structure of the universe and in the human role in this structure. During the eighteenth century philosophers, scientists and poets had been moving their spheres of speculation from God and problems of theology to concentrate more upon humanity.

It has been suggested that the titles of some of the major philosophi- cal works of this period are indicative of the prevailing concerns:

Locke's Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Shaftsbury's

Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), Pope's Essay on Man (1733), Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (1739) and Philosophical

Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1748), and Hartley's Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty and His Expectations (1749). 1 The interest suggested by these titles is two-fold; it is to observe 'human nature' , recording information about the behaviour of the human animal obtained empirically, and it is at the same time to explore 'human understanding' in an attempt to clarify the way in which man arrives at knowledge of himself and his environment. Interest in human understanding grew es­ pecially at this time, following the new theories of the accession of knowledge in which it was argued that reality, or, in Coleridge's terms, those things that exist without us, 2 may be defined only in terms of the act of human cognition. A thing that is known, even if it be another human being, is an inextricable part of the act of knowing itself. Be­ yond this, nothing may be established; the form and behaviour of matter, or 'reality' per se, may only be postulated. In this respect the nature and functions of the human mind gain primary importance for philosophic

1 See A.R. Humphries, The Augustan World, (1954; rpt. New York, 1963), pp. 179-180. 2 BL, I, 177.

12 enquiry, as they did in the eighteenth century.

It is not surprising that Coleridge should have been drawn

to recognise a heritage of psychological enquiry, since in his child­ hood and youth he always favoured reading and thinking to more physi­

cal pursuits. From the letters and notebooks of his early manhood in

the last decade of the eighteenth century, two aspects of his own mental activity become apparent; he had a quick and penetrating intel­

lect allied with an emotional constitution which was powerful and

rather volatile. It seems natural that as a young man he should have

grasped the substance of recent theses and that these should have com­ manded his enthusiasm for as long as they confirmed the findings of his own introspection. Despite variations in his philosophical views, he willingly followed the tradition established in the eighteenth century

and developed a lifelong interest in the human mind, maintaining as

early as November 1794 that 'Mind hath a divine Right of Sovereignty

over Body' • 3 For Coleridge the combination of strength of intellect

and of emotion was to prove fruitful in psychological enquiry. The

tendencies of intellect and emotion are to objectivity and subjectivity

respectively, and while the tensions occasioned by the opposition of

'thought' and 'feeling' caused Coleridge some intellectual confusion,

the influences of the two kept alive a special quality of 'felt life'

in his philosophy. He struggled to give theories their necessary ap­

plication to human experience and the high standard of veracity which

he tried to maintain in his self-analysis brought about a major change

in his conception of psychological processes.

3 CL , I, 122.

13 In fonning certain criteria about the way the mind operates,

Coleridge was at first impressed by the theory of the association of

ideas initiated by Locke and given fuller treatment by David Hartley

in Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty,and His Expectations. 4

Hartley argued the organization of the mind on a scientific principle, with Locke's 'tabula rasa' at one end of the scale and full knowledge of God at the other. His system demonstrates logically and intelli­ gently that man's best potential may be achieved by human agency and because it theoretically verifies the existence of God, it had a wide

appeal in the eighteenth century. Coleridge himself found associa­

tionism intellectually and emotionally satisfying until his constant

reference of its tenets to his own mental experiences caused him to

doubt its most fundamental premises. During those years in which

Coleridge was espoused to the theories of Hartley, he was also actively engaged in writing poetry so that he was able to use his own creativity

as the basis for psychological analysis. Eventually he came to reject

the 'necessary' implications of associationism completely and to rely

upon an image of organicism as the model for mental development - a

radical change which indicates a revolution in his whole approach to

the structure of thinking and consequently to the structure of art.

Initially however, Coleridge was excited to find in the

doctrine of the association of ideas a detailed organization of the

most amorphous and therefore least understood activities of the mind.

The materialist distinction between thought and matter was maintained

by Hartley but in giving detailed structure to both psychological and

4 Observations on Man (1749; facsimile reproduction ed. T.L. Huguelet, Florida, 1966). Hereafter this edition will be cited as Hartley and, except where otherwise stated, references are to Part 1 of the original publication.

14 physical processes and by suggesting their interdependence in a scheme characterised by activity, he offered a comprehensible and satisfying theory. He followed a tradition which made all thought a result of the same process, different classifications of activity being possible be­ cause of their occurring in different parts of the brain. Hartley's theory is based on the notion of a complete thinking apparatus which is tripartite in structure and which he labelled the 'Mind', the 'Brain', and the 'Senses' (pp.i-iv). The 'Mind' is a region of the unknown into which ideas are received irrespective of will, and initially this 'Mind' is completely blank. In the foetus there is no mental activity whatever and the 'Mind' does not awake until, at birth, sensations are impressed from without. 5 The 'Brain' for Hartley works in conjunction with the spinal marrow and the nerves and is defined as a 'white medullary Sub­ stance ••• , the innnediate Instrument, by which Ideas are presented to the

Mind: Or, in other Words, whatever Changes are made in this Substance, corresponding Changes are made in our Ideas; and vice versa' (Prop.2, p.8). This last proposition gives the 'Brain' no small importance in the growth of ideas and prompts even the suggestion that it 'may be reckoned the Seat of the sensitive Soul' or at least, 'equally related to the sensitive Soul, or Principle' (Prop.5, p. 31). Finally, the

'Senses' are simply the organs acted upon by external objects, produ­ cing vibrations in the 'Brain'.

On this structure then, Hartley propounds his 'Doctrine of

Vibrations'. When an object impinges upon the senses, the resulting vibrations in the brain convey 'Sensations' to the mind. These sen­ sations show a disposition to 'remain in the Mind for a short time

5 Hartley, Prop. 7, p.45.

15 after the sensible Objects are removed' (Prop.3, p.9), producing corresponding simple, sensory 'ideas'. It is not necessary to sum­ marise here Hartley's account of the generation of 'vibratiuncles' from vibrations; what is important is the development of the 'Doctrine of Association' from that of 'Vibrations'. If we accept the creation of simple ideas from primary sensations, then, according to Hartley, sensation can cause ideas to be associated.

Any Sensations A, B, C, ·&c. by being associated with one another a sufficient Number of Times, get such a power of the corresponding Ideas a, b, c, &c. that any one of the Sensations, A, when impressed alone, shall be able to excite in the Mind b, c, &c. the Ideas of the rest. (Prop. 10, p.65)

Then by extension, when the 'ideas' a, b, c, etc. are associated with each other frequently (as a fire with warmth and comfort), a new and

'complex idea' may result (perhaps that a fire is warm and pleasant).

This is the way in which thought processes are built up, as complex ideas are continually formed from simple ones by means of association.

Hartley is prepared to take his 'Doctrine of Association' much further than this. He goes on to make the corollary that, just as miniature vibrations may be exalted into complex ideas, so 'we are to conceive that the corresponding complex Ideas are proportionally exalted, and so pass into intellectual Affections and Passions' (Prop. 14, p.80).

In this way the actual development of thought and emotion is seen to operate according to a clearly defined organizational movement making the larger consequences of associationism immediately very appealing.

As 'Intellectual Affections and Passions' are finally transformed into

'Intellectual Pleasures' and 'Intellectual Pains', it becomes clear that the natural activity of man's mind is to progress from the finite and observable to the abstract and conceptual. Hartley states this Wlequivocally: 'Some degree of Spirituality is the necessary Conse- quence of passing through Life.' (Prop. 14, p.82) In order to demon- strate this he classifies the 'Intellectual Pleasures and Pains' into a hierarchical structure through which the ideas of the mind proceed in continual process of regeneration. First the pleasures and pains of imagination, ambition and self-interest are experienced respec­ tively, during which time feelings of 'purer sense' are observed to

take precedence over 'self'. From here the mind moves towards the experience of the pleasures and pains of 'Sympathy' with fellow men,

leading eventually to the pleasures and pains of 'Theopathy' and the

desire for Wl.ion with God (Props. 94-98, pp.418-92). Eventually this process will 'beget in us a Moral Sense, and lead us to the Love and

Approbation of Virtue, and to the Fear, Hatred, and Abhorrence of Vice'

(Prop. 99, p.497). So man may be led through his mental experiences not only back to a state of virtue, but to the bliss of Paradise itself,

says Hartley. 6 His logic has a particular appeal; 'our sensible Plea-

sures are far more numerous than our sensible Pains' and intellectual pleasures will correspondingly outnl..llllber intellectual pains, being

'nothing but the sensible ones variously mixed and compounded together'/

so the doctrine of association may be shown to promote 'pure ultimate

spiritual Happiness, in all' (Prop. 14, p.84).

Even from a simple suzmnary such as this, it may be seen that

Hartley vastly extended a basic theory of associationism into an all­

encompassing doctrine. And when surveying this doctrine from the view

point of a student of Coleridge, several features immediately stand out-

6 Prop. 14, p.83. 1 ibid.

17 the extreme clarity of definition, the tightness of the structural or­ ganization of mental states and a basic pattern of hierarchical develop­ ment dependent upon refinement and intensity. In Bartley's view the highest psychological attainments open avenues to the spiritual but are always bound by a structural process itself mechanical. The only pos­ sible freedoms in development are incurred by variations in the external conditions; rising from complete emptiness, the associative procedures are always identical. This of course means that at all stages in the refinement of intelligence, the personal impulse is completely governed by necessity, even though personality, as such, may develop in an end­ less variety of ways and the infinite possibility of individuality remains unquestionable.

Such a theory then offers, in various ways, great scope for optimism, especially for a young man like Coleridge who was intellec­ tually inquisitive and had firm religious conviction. But perhaps the most challenging implication of its optimism lies in the strictly human context. The simple structure of interrelationship postulated between the mind and the phenomenal world argues that the growth of a man's mind, his understanding and his personality depend exclusively upon his en­ vironment. Control and selection within the environment can therefore produce calculable effects upon mental development, offering almost un­ limited scope for social harmony. Hartley himself does not hesitate to embrace this conclusion.

For we are all alike in Kind, and do not differ greatly in Degree here. We have each of us Passions of all Sorts, and lie open to Influences of all Sorts; so that the Persons A and B, in whatever Proportions their intellectual Affections now exist, may, by a suitable Set of Impressions, become hereafter alike. 8

8 Part II, Prop. 94, p.425.

18 By extension, then, society and eventually mankind as a whole may be motivated towards a desired goal by accurate organization of the ex- ternal environment. And Coleridge's youthful concern for the future of humanity quickly brought him under the influence of a benevolent necessity. He wrote to his brother George in 1794:

And after a diligent, I may say, an intense study of Locke, Hartley and others who have written most wisely on the nature of man - I appear to myself to see the point of pos­ sible perfection at which the World may perhaps be destined to arrive. 9

A little later he reinforced his commitment by giving a 'Moral and

Political Lecture' in Bristol in January 1795 in which,following

Godwin, he is 'convinced that vice is error' 1, 0 the inevitable effect of the environment. Coleridge was particularly impressed by the pos­ sibility of changing the circumstances and improving the man. As much as three years later he was prepared to act as superintendent in Thomas

Wedgwood's scheme for the education of genius which was based on the theories of association and necessity. 11 Wedgwood proposed to finance a special kind of nursery which was to be simply composed of plain, grey walls. The idea was that if a child were totally confined within these walls then all stimuli (and therefore by association, the whole mental life of the child) could be controlled by the superintendent.

Such a system proved repugnant to Wordsworth but it was still acceptable to Coleri.d.ge as late as 1797.

9 CL , I, 126. 10 LPR , p.10. See also Basil Willey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p.49.

11 The details of Wedgwood's plans fox the education of genius axe con­ tained in his letter of 31 July 1797. This is printed fully and discussed, together with comments on the opinions of Coleridge and Wordsworth, by David Erdman in "Wordsworth, Coleridge and the Wedgwood Fund; Part I: Tom Wedgwood's Master Stroke," B.N.Y.P.L., 60(1956), 425-443, and "Part II: Nursery of Genius or School of Nature," B.N.Y.P.L., 60(1956), 487-507.

19 Coleridge's initial enthusiasm for a world view based on associationist psychology is well known; in his letters of November and December 1794 he speaks of himself as 'an Advocate for the Auto­ matism of Man' , 12 'an Optimist' , 13 even 'a compleat Necessitarian' who could 'understand the subject as well almost as Hartley himself'. 14

In 1796 he christened his first baby 'DAVID HARTLEY COLERIDGE' with the wish that 'his head will be convinced of, & his heart saturated with, the truths so ably supported by that great master of Christian

Philosophy'. 15 But despite his emotionalism Coleridge was not a man to let his exploratory intellect lie dormant and he did not study

Hartley's theories in isolation. He says he 'successively studied in the schools of Locke, Berkeley, Leibnitz, and Hartley' 16 and it is well known that he derived pleasure and satisfaction from contemla­ ting Berkeley's idealism during the years when he was most excited by Hartley. 17 And as Herbert Piper has pointed out, Coleridge's poetry of this period is indicative of the variety and complexity of his meta­ physical speculations. 18 In for example, the poet describes the 'drowsed soul' in the process of purification in lines which convey suggestions of Plato, of Hartley's necessitarianism and also of Berkeley:

From Hope and firmer Faith to perfect Love Attracted and absorbed: and centered there God only to behold, and know, and feel, Till by exclusive consciousness of God All self-annihilated it shall make

12 CL, I, 147. 1 3 CL, I, 145. 14 CL, I, 137. 15 CL, I, 236. 16 BL, I, 93. 1 7 He states with convi et ion to John Thelwal 1 at the end of 1796, 'I am a Berkelian' (CL, I, 278). The interplay of philosophies has also been noted by James D. Boulger in "Imagination and Speculation in Coleridge's ,• J.E.G.P., 64 (1965), 708-709. 18 The Active Universe (London, 1962), pp. 29-30.

?n God its Identity: God all in all! We and our Father one! 19

It is clearly the organized scientific explanation of spirituality which attracts Coleridge but he brings to his opinion a wider vision than can be embraced by a single theory.

There are several indications in Coleridge's early poetry of interpretive responses to mental activity, even at the height of his established belief in associationism. In 1795 Hartley's influence prompted his allegoric interpretation of the 'Eolian Harp' but, as I will suggest more specifically later, the poem betrays some confusion about the nature and initiation of mental activity. 20 Even in the first draft of the poem,individual thought processes are depicted as parallel to the forces of life which God has 'breathed' into natural phenomena yet they, like 'mechaniz'd matter' become as 'organic harps' for the interpretation of stimuli. 21 The upsurge of emotion expressed here suggests that it is the growth of individuality which excites the poet.

Perhaps it was his reading of the mystics such as Fox, Boehme and Law who, as Coleridge said, 'contributed to keep alive the heart in the head', 22 that encouraged him to follow his emotional tendency to seek for a special grormd of individuality and creativity as distinct from an explanation of their development. This interest was to have a marked effect on his poetry. There is,for example, a significant ten­ sion evident in This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison which was written in

19 PW, I, 110-111. H.N. Fairchild suggests that this passage indicates Coleridge's 'moving towards a more religious, mystical and transcen­ dental point of view', led by the religious and spiritual emphases of Bartley's associationism: See "Hartley, Pistorius and Coleridge," PMLA, 62 (1947), p. 1018ff. 20 See below, Chapter VI, p.145. 21 See PW, II, 1022-1023. 22 BL, I, 98.

21 1797 when Hartley's influence on Coleridge's metaphysics was waning.

In a central statement in this poem, the poet exhorts the beauties of

Nature (the 'glorious sun', 'the purple heath-flowers', 'the distant groves' and the 'blue ocean') 23 to 'shine out' upon the passive minds of his friends, thereby kindling in them the 'deep Joy' of creative perception. In direct contrast to this is the movement of the poem itself. At first the poet tries to recapture his own mood and to pro­ ject this into the natural world around him. His feelings of loneli­ ness and self-pity fill a landscape of shaded dells, with 'the branch­ less ash,/ Unsunn'd and damp' and 'the dark green file of long, lank weeds' dripping to the 'blue clay-stone'. Then, the poet seems to experience an effacement of himself in an imaginative identification with his friends who are seen emerging beneath 'the wide, wide Heaven', and a sense of joy and release enters the poem. The poet's mood is transformed by his vision and correspondingly he transforms the land- scape around him: 'Nor in· this bower,/ This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark'd/ Much that has sooth'd me'. Now there is dappling sunshine through the leaves, a fine display of light and shade on the elm and ivy, even 'the solitary humble-bee/ Sings in the bean-flower~'

Clearly here, within the creative experience itself, the immediate relationship between the poet and nature is directed by the poet him­ self and the natural phenomena are used in the poem as correlatives for a mysteriously self-determined emotional condition.

What is primarily structural in This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison becomes the overt statement of ''. In so far as this poem may be said to recreate a specifically creative experience, of whatever kind,

23 Quotations in this paragraph are all from 'This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison', PW, I, 178-181. the way in which the creative urge is suggested indicates the complete change in Coleridge's attitudes. A point about Hartley's theory of the development of thought and therefore of the birth of original ideas, is that because ideas are the products of mechanical progression, their relationship to the individual man is arbitrary. Such ideas which, for

Coleridge, constitute an integral part of the essential man, are, at least theoretically, retraceable through the stages of their formation.

Hartley himself embraces this implication of his theory:

It is of the utmost Consequence to Morality and Religion, that the Affections and Passions should be analysed into their simple compounding Parts, by reversing the steps of the Associations which concur to form them. (Prop. 14, p.81)

But, if the very essence of a man's creativity can be traced back to its origins, then all mystery is removed from humanity. In 'Kubla Khan'

Coleridge depicts emphatically the rise of an unsolicited power, which acts as an extreme contrast to the Khan's measured creativity. 24 The whole movement of the verse is changed with the ejaculation of a mighty fountain from a chasm which is significantly described as savage, holy and enchanted. The image of creativity is sustained by the subsequent violent activity, progression and gradual subsidence of the power depic­

ted, and its most telling impact, which is that of the moment of cre­ ation itself, is effected when the whole world of the poem is taken by

the storm of this uncontrollable force. Its suddenness is emphasised

as it is projected from some deep seat of mystery. 'Kubla Khan' pre­

sents the vision of a life force rooted in enigma whose nature can be

altered but not detelt'Illined by environmental influence. 25

24 PW, I, 297. 25 In an early discussion on Coleridge's change from necessity to tran- scendentalism, S.F. Gingerich recognises, I think, the significance of 'Kubla Khan' in this respect,but the poem counters his assertion that 'in this period, Coleridge created none but passive necessitarian­ like characters' and so he dismisses it as a 'fragment of pure aesthetic luxury' without any discoverable sequence of ideas. (op. ci t., p. 22 & n) This kind of argument is well answered by Elizabeth Schneider, Coleridge Opium and 'Kubla Khan' (Chicago, 1953), pp. 238-288.

23 It is clear that, especially during the years of his own poetic creativity, Coleridge's conceptions of mental phenomena reveal a complexity which cannot be fully answered by a system of associa­ tionism such as Hartley's. In particular we can note the emotional dissatisfaction which Coleridge came to feel about the 'tabula rasa' mind and about the necessity for passive reception of impression be­ fore mental activity is generated. Of particular concern at this time was the basis of personality, that is, the cause of man's iden- tity as well as his observable development. In the earliest version of '' Coleridge had traced the mechanistic production of 'that, which each calls, I' 26 but by the time he came to write

'Lines Written in the Album at Elbingerode in the Hartz Forest' in

1799, the emphasis was completely changed. This poem puts its stress on the individuality of natural forms2 7 and on the discovery that

'outward forms, the loftiest! still receive/ Their finer influence from the Life within' • 2 8 In his summary of the poet's changing theo­ ries of perception during his friendship with Wordsworth, Herbert Piper makes the important point that at this time he began to interpret the various functions of mental development in a new way, re.assigning impor­ tance to the lower functions such as the senses. 29 The structure which

Hartley accorded to psychological experiences resembles a ladder in so far as each stage in development once attained, is independent of those on whose presence it rests. Gradually Coleridge came to see that the simpler functions of the mind continue in their own activity even as

6 PW , II, 521. 27 And the breeze, murmuring indivisibly, Preserved its solemn murmur most distinct From many a note of many a waterfall, And the brook's chatter ..• (PW, I,315) 28 PW, I, 316. 29 op. ci t. , pp. 80-81.

24 they open out in development of more complex processes. As Shawcross has pointed out, in he describes the activity where

the poet's visionary experience is initiated by the song of the lark, which then continues to contribute to the total experience even through

the birth of 'many feelings, many thoughts' , and through that 'medi ta­

ti ve joy' which brings with it a directly religious experience:

Till all his senses gradually wrapt In a half-sleep, he dreams of better worlds And dreaming hears thee still, 0 singing Lark, That singest like an angel in the clouds. 30

Thus we see the beginnings of a depiction of growth, where what is des­

cribed is a nodal activity of the mind in which the complete mental

state depends for its existence on each of the contributing functions even while they are themselves assimilated into new forms of activity.

Perhaps the most far-reaching objection which Coleridge was

to raise against associationism was that by its very religious optimism,

it makes spirituality a condition of materialism. If the mechanism of

association is the sole explanation for the growth of the mind, then

all mental experience relates to time and space, to the behaviour of

physical matter. Later when Coleridge discussed the shortcomings of

the theory in his Biographia Literaria, he comments most forcefully

that 'the sum total of all my moral and intellectual intercourse ••• is

reduced to extension, motion, degrees of velocity' . 31 Then following

the emotional dissatisfaction comes the intellectual:

It is a mere delusion of the fancy to conceive the pre­ existence of the ideas, in any chain of association. as so many differently coloured billiard-balls in contact, so that when an object, the billiard-stick, strikes the

30 PW I, 257. See Shawcross's introduction, BL, I, xix-xx. 31 BL , I, 82. first or white ball, the same motion propagates itself through the red, green, blue, and black, and sets the whole in motion. No! 32

Personal experience caused him to repudiate the idea that man's whole being is an aggregate of successive single sensations and Coleridge came to trust his intuition.

Who ever felt a single sensation? Is not every one at the same moment conscious that there coexists a thousand others, a darker shade, or less light? ••• And what is a moment? Succession with interspace? Absurdity! 3 3

In 1803 Coleridge made a note repudiating Godwin's exposition of

Necessity on this issue of the singleness of sensation:

Godwin to trace at each sentence, all the thought & associations leading to it - O folly. Little reflected he, how much of Eternity there is in each moment of Time! 34 ·

Apprehension of the spiritual was for Coleridge the result of such a complex and personal refinement of mental faculties that he was natu­ rally led to seek for a spiritual impulse as the cause rather than the effect of human development. Eventually he found special difficulty in reconciling the voluntary aspects of the human personality and their important roles in religious conviction, with the products of an en­ vironmental situation. In the mechanical system of Hartley, he felt,

••• the will, the reason, the judgement, and the under­ standing, instead of being the determining causes of association, must needs be represented as its creatures and among its mechanical effects. 35

32 BL, I, 75. 3 3 AP, pp. 86-87. 34 Notebooks, I, 1563. This comment spotlights the kind of problems in- curred by Lowes in his analysis of the operations of the creative imagination in The Road to Xanadu (1927; rpt. Cambridge, Mass., 1955). 35 BL, I, 76. The emerging problem here is that of the growth of self-consciousness.

Self-awareness and self-analysis, in conjunction with judgement and the voluntary exercise of will, offer a man the freedom to control and direct his own fate to some degree and, above all, to accept respon- sibility for his actions. One of the distinct limitations of Hartley's system was that it dictated the direction of mental growth without taking account of the directive properties of self-consciousness. The activities of judgement, free-will and conscience inevitably conspire to blur the edges of self-assessment, by means of which so much of the personality is organized and understood. The very clarity of Hartley's picture renders it too exclusive. At the height of his allegiance to

Hartley, Coleridge had been able to say, 'Guilt is out of the Question -

I am a Necessitarian, and of course deny the possibility of it'. 36 His own experience of guilt, however, proved increasingly to be no chimera so once again he was forced to account intellectually for something grounded in his emotions.

In 1799 Coleridge went with the Wordsworths to Germany where he spent his time studying the German language and reading for a pro­ posed history of German literature. He was still struggling with the opposition between Hartley's philosophy and his own experience,as Melvin

Rader has argued on evidence from Clement Carlyon, one of Coleridge's companions. 37 His concentration on metaphysical problems continued at home during his frequent bouts of ill health in 1800 and 1802. As a distraction from pain Coleridge speculated upon the theories contained in the material which he had brought home from Germany and it was pro-

36 CL , I, 213.

3 7 Wordsworth: A Philosophi:cal Approach (Oxford~ 1967), pp.13-14.

27 bably at about this time that he began to organise his dissatisfac­ tions with Hartley's system. In a revealing letter to Godwin of

September 1800 he says that his 'mind has been busied with specula­ tions' concerning the thought processes which produce words. 38 He is already prepared to suggest to Godwin that those mental acts which seem to be the result of a 'pre-designing Consciousness' may in fact be the products of a process of organic growth in which human feelings play a significant part, rather than of a logical system.

He then questions rather forcefully, 'Are not words &c parts & ger­ minations of the Plant? And what is the Law of their Growth?' 39

A little later, in February 1801, Coleridge reinvestigated Locke's

Essay on Human Understanding and the whole notion of the mind's re­ ceptivity, and he discussed his conclusions in letters to Josiah

Wedgwood. He remarks that he does not consider 'the Doctrine of innate Ideas ••• so utterly absurd & ridiculous' as did Mr. Locke. 40

Then about a month later he formulated his objections even more clearly in a discussion on the work of Newton.

Newton was a mere materialist - Mind in his system is always passive - a lazy Looker-on on an external World. If the Mind be not passive, if it be indeed made in God's Image, & that too in the sublimest sense - the Image of the Creator - there is ground for suspicion, that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system. 4 1

Here Coleridge presents human creativity as parallel to the initiating creativity of God himself and is prepared to distrust any knowledge based entirely on a passive mind. Thus he is also able to declare that

38 CL, I,625. Herbert Piper stresses the importance of this letter in demonstrating Coleridge's developing ideas (op.cit., p.132). 39 CL, I, 625. 40 CL I II, 696. 4 1 CL , II, 709.

28 he has 'overthrown the doctrine of Association, as taught by Hartley ••• especially the doctrine of Necessity'. 42

In 1803 Coleridge was still considering the ways in which the process of association contributed to the range of mental activities which he understood from his own experience. Perhaps because of his own kind of personality he began to feel that emotion played a primary rather than a secondary role in germinating ideas. He wrote :

I hold, that association depends in a much greater degree on the recurrence of resembling states of Feeling, than on Trains of Idea ••. & if this be true, Hartley's system totters ••• I almost think, that Ideas never recall Ideas, as far as they are Ideas -- any more than Leaves in a forest create each other's motion -- The Breeze it is that runs thro' them/it is the Soul, the state of Feeling.4 3

There is a clear suggestion here that, for Coleridge, 'Trains of Idea'

are too much like conscious and recognisable psychological phenomena

to be initiators of a creative process which he understood to be mysterious in origin. He had noted earlier that as 'Feeling' grows

deep and steady, 'Ideas' in the consciousness become dim, and by

thid kind of introspection our own identity may be recognised. 44 The

'Ideas' in this context are characterised by potential distinctness and

clarity, despite their number and similarity, but Coleridge wanted to

convey a more unconsciously motivated, amorphous state of 'Feeling' as

the ground for cognitive development. To express his changing convic­

tion he redefines the image of the creative breeze so that, no longer

representing external stimulus to a passive brain, the breeze issues

42 CL, II, 706. 43 CL, II, 961. As early as December 1796 he had said of himself, 'I feel strongly, and I think strongly; but I seldom feel without thin­ king, or think without feeling.' (CL, I, 279) At this time, however, he considered feeling a 'faulty habit' which he was struggling to subdue. (See CL, I, 285) 44 Notebooks, I, 921.

')Q from within, stirred by the personal force of fee ling. He had written to Thomas Wedgwood earlier in the same year:

.•• within the embracement of rocks & hills ••• a wild activity, of thoughts, imaginations, feelings, and impulses of motion, rises up from within me - a sort of bottom-wind, that blows to no point of the compass, & comes from I know not whence. 45

In this account the poet is emotionally moved by the natural en- vironment so that a train of mental experiences is caused to emerge to consciousness from deep within the individual, from an indefine- able source which is again characterised by its mystery and sanctity.

It is interesting that in the later letter, Coleridge equates this source of emotional power with the 'Soul' so that experience of God is felt to coincide with mental development and to originate in a force for which there is no empirical ground.

At times of sickness and despondency, however, Coleridge struggled with this new-won conviction. When his own creative power seemed stopped at the source, he had again to look outside himself for the 'bottom-wind' of inspiration. This issue is the dialectic of his

'Dejection: An Ode', written in 1802. In this poem he exhorts the storm winds to stir his numb faculties, trying to recall his past op­ timism in passive response to nature and clutching at the old 'Eolian

Harp' idea.

These sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed, And sent my soul abroad, Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give, Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live~ 46

4 5 CL , II, 916. 4 6 PW , I, 36 3.

30 Again, however, the veracity of his introspection causes Coleridge to realise that it is his own emotional condition which is preventing his creativity: 'I may not hope from outward forms to win/ The passion and the life, whose fountains are within' • 47 And again the source of the emotional state (here given as 'Joy') is felt to reside in the

'soul itself' :

And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element. 48

The force of the poem is, despite the prevailing mood of despondency, emphatically with the belief born in 'Kubla Khan': 'the fountains are within'.

It has been generally recognised that Coleridge's conception of a spiritual intuition which is not the product of associated ideas, was greatly advanced by a study of Kant in the early months of 1801. 49

The early change in Coleridge's views came to provide the basis for his mature thinking on all subjects, metaphysical and aesthetic. His main position rested on the belief that the living mind brings with it a special mysterious property of intuitive response to experience as the measure of its life. As he later expressed it in the Biographia:

.•• how being can transform itself into a knowing, becomes conceivable on one only condition; namely, if it can be shown that .•• the Sentient, is itself

47 PW, I, 365. 48 ibid. 4 9 See for example Herbert Piper, op. cit. ,p.133 and Basil Willey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p.86. For a discussion of Coleridge's debt to Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, see R. Park, "Poetic Imagination and Practical Reason," B.J.A. ,B,335-346, and George Whalley,"Coleridge and Kant: Two Views of Imagination," Poetic Process (London,1953). Coleridge's interpretive use of Kant's philosophy is assessed in de­ tail by Thomas McFarland, op.cit.

31 a species of being ••• But how any affection from without can metamorphose itself into perception or will, the materialist has hitherto left ••• incomprehensible. 50

Then, in operation, the receptive mind 'grows' to greater depths of understanding and self-awareness by a process which Coleridge came to describe as organic. He envisaged the functions of the mind as exhibiting nodal activity characterised by upward expansion as in growth. It was the logical presentation of mental movement which had first attracted Coleridge to Hartley's doctrine because he wanted an account of the mind which emphasised its £1 uid activity rather than its static states. In one of the most enthusiastic of his early state- ments he declares: 'but I go farther than Hartley and believe the cor­ poreality of thought - namely, that it is motion.' 51 But seven years later when he watches his young son Hartley coming to terms with reality in the form of a landscape and its mirror-image, he recognises an 'Abstract of Thinking as a pure act & energy, of Thinking as dis-

52 tinguished from Thoughts' • This comment reveals a concept of mind in which activity and productivity are seen as complementary though distinguishable. 'Thoughts' are here definable entities being the property of consciousness but they are none-the-less part of the con­ tinuous process of their own generation and regeneration. This pro­ cess can be understood only as a 'pure act & energy' but modelled on the growing organism it can be visualised and examined.

How far one might imagine all the association System out of a system of growth/ thinking of the Brain & Soul, what we know of an embryo - one tiny particle

50 BL , I, 89-90. 5 1 CL , I, 137. 5 2 Notebooks, I, 92 3. This distinction forms the basis of OWen Barfield' s interesting study of Coleridge's system of 'polarity' ,op.cit., pp.13-40. Hereafter this work will be referred to as Barfield.

32 combines with another, its like. & so lengthens & thickens. 53

Vegetable growth now provides a valuable means of depicting a process of progression in place of the one of succession offered by Hartley.

As W.K. Wimsatt has commented, Coleridge became concerned with more complex ontological grounds of association, transcending the simple

'associative response'. 54 By settling on organicism as a model, the poet gave himself a fruitful avenue for further speculation.

53 Notebooks, II, 2373.

54 "The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery," in English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. M.H. Abrams (New York, 1960), p. 28.

33 CHAPTER III MIND AS ORGANISM There has been considerable discussion about the nature and value of Coleridge's use of organicism mainly because it became the basis for much of his literary criticism. The poet's interpretation of organic theory is, however, interesting in its own right as psycho­ logy. His conception of the organic nature of the mind is in fact more complex than is conveyed in the assumption that he simply interpreted mental development analogically, making a series of parallels with vegetable growth and consequently suffering the restrictions imposed by the model. What Coleridge does specifically is to extend the base analogy between the growth of the plant to its full fruition and the development of the mind to its height of productivity,so that he achieves a pictorial image of mental operations. By transposing the attributes of the biological term of the analogy to the psychological term and then re-interpreting them with reference to the new context,

Coleridge is able to overcome the limitations of the analogy. In other words it comes naturally to him to use organicism descriptively of mental functions rather than analogically. 1

Meyer H. Abrams has provided the standard account of organic growth as Coleridge used it with respect to literary invention, 2 and more recently Stephen Prickett has followed this with a detailed ana­ lysis of the whole scope of Coleridge's organicism. Both commentators find that the reason for Coleridge's recurring allusions to mental growth in biological terms is that the elected analogue did not finally

It is to be noted that Owen Barfield has reached the same conclusions in this respect; see Barfield, pp.60, 125 and 210n. 2 Abrams, pp.167-177 and 218-225.

34 solve his problems; it did not allow for the supervention of conscious­ ness in the development of thought. While both men stress the short­ sightedness of Pater's famous assertion that Coleridge's theory looks like 'some blindly organic process of assimilation', Abrams concludes that human freedom of will runs counter to the analogue and for this reason its justification became a crux for Coleridge (p.173), and

Prickett suggests that in Coleridge's use the theory of organic growth

'retained the very ambiguity it had been employed to solve' (p.65). In my opinion there is no reason to suppose that, for Coleridge, the super­ induction of the conscious mental faculties in the human process causes inconsistency in his use of the figure of vegetable growth. Rather it is apparent from several statements that he was fully aware of the dis­ tinction imposed by the added quality of self-consciousness experienced by the human mind, and yet he still did not choose to reject the philo­ sophy of organicism as he had come to reject mechanism in 1801. In his frequent reconsiderations of the parallel growth processes, he seems to be reinforcing the significance of comparing them. As I have suggested in the previous chapter, one of Coleridge's most sustained interests was in the nature of process and it is in its clarification of this that the value of a comparison lies. The increase of self-awareness which con­ stitutes consciousness in the human mind is an effect or product of the growth process, one which certainly contributes to further generation in a unique way but whose presence does not change the nature of the process itself. Its supervention therefore does not detract from the appropriateness of the structural model.

That Coleridge felt this may be established from an examina­ tion of the way in which he used the analogy. In an important passage from The Friend, he outlines clearly one way in which the human mind works productively:

35 ••• there must be a mental antecedent ••• the initiative thought, the intellectual seed, must itself have its birth-place within, whatever excitement from without may be necessary for its germination. Will the soul thus awakened neglect or undervalue the outward and conditional causes of her growth? Far rather ••• will it be with her, as if a stem or trunk, suddenly endued with sense and reflection, should contemplate its green shoots, their leafits and budding blossoms, wondered at as then first noticed, but welcomed nevertheless as its own growth: while yet with undiminished gratitude, and a deepened sense of dependency, it would bless the dews and the sunshine from without, deprived of the awakening and fostering excitement of which, its own productivity would have remained forever hidden from itself, or felt only as the obscure trouble of a baffled instinct. 3

A passage such as this fully supports Abrams' summary statement of the particular attributes offered by the plant in the analogy of creativity, viz. 'an inherent potential design, unfolding spontaneously from within, and assimilating to its own nature the materials needed for its nourish­ ment and growth'. 4 But the passage also reveals how the parallel pro­ cesses of growth are reciprocally meaningful in Coleridge's terms.

Primarily here a direct equivalence is made between the seed and the

'mental antecedent' where in each case, contained latent power is un- knowable until made manifest as product in the act of germination. Any further speculation as to the nature of seed or mind-in-essence must be hypothetical but, by means of the analogy, Coleridge attempts to estab­ lish a working basis for a theory. As emphasised by Abrams, Prickett and many others, from the seed growth is possible only in accordance with a pattern fixed by heredity. Coleridge, however, finds satisfac­ tion in the seed as symbol in its additional contained mystery of poten­ tial wrought by the combined operations of necessity and chance. Free-

3 Friend, I, 513-514. 4 Abrams, p .16 7.

36 doro in development is initially offered by the mysterious nature of the 'birthplace within', or by that condition of the matter itself which constitutes its own potential for life. In a discussion with

John Thelwall, Coleridge insists that life can not be 'the result of organised matter acted on by external Stimuli' 5 but is to be discerned in a certain property of living matter, that is, its 'capability of being stimulated into sensation'. 6 In this way he allows for the possibility of unique development, irrespective of environmental hazards, and invalidates the charge of exchanging the determinism of mechanism for a similar one in organicism.

According to this view the seed is a seat of vast and complex potential, determined only within pre-established limits and dependent for the direction and power of its growth on its innate capability for assimilation and on the ways in which this capability is spurred from without to response. Its growth is not totally determined either by its innate composition or by theinfluences of the environment, but depends for its fulfilment on the complex interrelationship of the two. This theory answers the problem that no two daisies are alike even as, to use Prickett's example, a daisy can never become a rose. As Prickett has pointed out, if growth is internally determinate, the roles of edu­ cation and enlightened influence become correspondingly less important and as much as Coleridge rejected the over-emphasis on environmental in­ fluence occasioned by necessitarianism, so did he mistrust its neglect.

He recounts an amusing anecdote in his Table Talk of another conversa- tion with Thelwall:

5 CL, I, 294. 6 ibid.

37 I showed him my garden, and told him it was my botanical garden. 'How so?' said he, 'it is co­ vered with weeds.' - 'Oh,' I replied, 'that is only because it has not yet come to its age of discretion and choice. The weeds, you see, have taken the li­ berty to grow, and I thought it unfair in me to pre­ judice the soil towards roses and strawberries: 7

Thus before considering the complication of consciousness, we may see that the process of mental growth operates in the same way as

vegetable propagation, where the pre-eminent quality is individual

latent potential. Denying 'tabula rasa', in the Biographia, Coleridge

endorses Leibniz's qualification of the proposition 'nihil in intellectu

quod non prius in sensu' with 'praeter ipsum intellectum'. 8 He con-

tinued to struggle with the problems of definition incurred by the recog­

nition of both uni versa! and particular operations of life forces in the

mind, but was finally able to postulate their synthesis because he con-

centrated on the nature of the process of growth, using the manifesta­

tions only as buoys to indicate specific positions in a phenomenon cha­

racterised by movement. In fact this synthesis provides the very condi­

tion of further growth, given only the added operation of assimilation.

In the account of organicism in the above passage, Coleridge

shows that the initiation of germination depends upon the presence and

character of external stimuli. The seed relies upon 'dews and sunshine'

and in like manner the Soul demands 'outward and conditional causes' for

her growth. Later Coleridge outlined the operations of the biological

organism in Aids to Reflection:

The material mass itself is acquired by assimilation. The germinal power of the plant transmutes the fixed air and the elementary base of water into grass or leaves. 9

7 IS, p. 75. 8 BL, I, 93. And interestingly the same qualification is emphasised many years latex in Aids to Reflection (AR, p.150n). 9 AR, p.267. 38 By assimilation then, a series of component parts is generated, each new product developing from the previous one by progressive metamor-

, 10 p h OSl.S. At each stage the process is similar as external stimuli continue to provoke assimilation. Significantly, however, Coleridge envisages an ascending scale, the 'hatching and brooding' effected by the life force being characterised by increasing intensity and po­ tentiation.11 This is identical with the development of thought.

Coleridge sees a progression from the initial production of images from the sensory experiences of touch and sight, to the more complex assimi­ lative procedure when the sensory images, themselves the constituents of a dawning consciousness, provide new stimuli for the germination of thought. This is the beginning of that reflective activity which con­ stitutes articulate self-awareness and it signifies the birth of intel­ ligence. At this point (still only hypothetical because imperceptible in the actual development of the mind) the nature of the organism is changed, becoming for the first time specifically human. Coleridge wrote to Wordsworth in 1815 that intelligence may be 'considered in its different powers from the Plant up to that state in which the difference in Degree becomes a new kind (man, self-consciousness)'. 12

The process of growth itself is not changed by the superven­ tion of consciousness, rather its assimilative potential is increased.

'Events and images ••• are like light, and air, and moisture, to the

10 Note also Coleridge's manuscript comment: In the plant each part is capable of passing by metamorphosis, progressive and retrogressive, into every other - while yet each remaining bears or supports the higher, the root bearing the stem, the stem the leaves, all the calyx and flower. (IS, p.223) 11 See IS, p.225. 12 CL, II, 649.

39 seed of the mind' so that 'from the first or initiative idea successive i'd eas germina. te' • 13 At this level then stimuli may be either the con- scious or the unconscious products of past experience and, simultaneous- ly, the objects of the senses continue to stimulate the mind so the pos- sibilities for production are increased without altering the nature of the growth of the mind. When, in the passage quoted above, Coleridge fancifully bestows consciousness upon the 'stem or trunk' of the tree, he presents a parallel with the mental processes and reveals to what extent he has extended and reworked the psychological term of the ana­ logy. In using the structure of biological growth to clarify the opera- tions of mind, Coleridge conceives of the mind itself as a growing or­ ganism; he applies the attributes of vegetable organicism to the abstract processes of mind directly rather than purely analogically, so that the operations of reflective self-consciousness in the thought process are effectively absorbed. As conveyed in the passage, the first products of germination are conceived unoonsciously but, as these constitute the birth of consciousness, they are capable of contemplating their own pro- ductive processes, undergoing gradual transformation by virtue of the act of contemplation itself. In the passage Coleridge highlights the wonder, joy and gratitude emerging from the human experience and con­ veys how emotion, here initially a product of the basic process, becomes in itself a powerful impetus to further development, adding greater comp­ lexity to psychological creativity. When deprived of the materials for assimilation, however, neither seed nor 'mental antecedent' can foster new life, the former because its physical potential would remain dor­ mant, the latter because its own productivity would forever remain hidden from itself. Growth in the mind is the extension of consciousness. l 3 LL, p. 7.

40 Thus Coleridge's organic theory of mental growth reveals a hierarchical pattern of productivity organised on the same principle

as that operating in the vegetable world. Undoubtedly his fonnulation

of the theory owed much to German Nature-philosophy and its heritage

from Boehme 14 and it is given greatest exposition in the essay 'Hints

towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life' which

Coleridge may have written in collaboration with Dr. James Gillman. 15

Notably the consistently recurring thesis-anti thesis-synthesis struc­

ture of nodal growth is of pre-eminent importance to Coleridge and it

appears in recognizable, though powerful, fonn. In the seed, as in

the mind, birth is the only manifestation of the life principle and

it is generated out of that same polar tension which characterises for

Coleridge the innate potential of living matter. In the Theory of Life

Coleridge places the creative moment in the physical sciences in a

tension of centrifugal and centripetal forces:

Thus, in the identity of the two counter-powers, Life subsists; in their strife it consists: and in their reconciliation it at once dies and is born again into a new fonn: 6

Life, then, is growth based on the 'polarity, or the essential dualism

of Nature' 17 through which 'the two component counter-powers actually

inte%penetrate each other and generate a higher third, including both

the fonner'. 18 In the life of the mind, stimulus and potential are con-

14 See S.F. Mason, Main Currents of Scientific Thought (New York, 1956), pp. 282-283. 15 See Miscellanies, p. 351 and JDC, p. cxx1.1. n. Norman Fruman argues Coleridge's debt to Schelling and Steffens in this 'Theory of Life' (Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel (1971; rpt. London, 1972], p.123ff) but the most scholarly assessment of Coleridge's original thinking re­ mains that of Thomas McFarland, op.cit., pp.xxiii-xl,1-52 and 323-325. 16 TL, p. 580. 17 TL, p. 578. 18 TL, p. 587.

.Ill tinually interacting to promote generation and regeneration; in the vegetable world the parallel process is depicted by Coleridge in 1816 with power derived from symbolism:

[The natural organism] strikes its roots and unfolds its leaves, absorbs and respires ••• and breathes a repairing spirit, at once the food and tone of the atmosphere, into the atmosphere that feeds it ... [it] effectuates its own secret growth, still contracting to fix what expanding it had refined ••• Lo! - how upholding the ceaseless plastic motion of the parts in the profoundest rest of the Whole it becomes •.• the natural symbol of that higher life of reason. 19

As a result of this parallelism between the human and vege­ table cycles of growth, Coleridge discerns special significance in their relation to each other. The mind, he argues, spontaneously apprehends in nature that tendency to regeneration which constitutes its own acti- vity and thereby experiences a total emotional equilibrium.

I seem to myself to behold in the quiet objects, on which I am gazing. • • more than a mere simile, the work of my own Fancy! I feel an awe, as if there were before my eyes the same Power, as that of the REASON - the same Power in a lower dignitr, and therefore a symbol established in the truth of things. 0

This is a clarification of the operation of stimulus on the mind.

Powers which are elsewhere described as operating exclusively within or without the mind, are now seen to interpenetrate producing new growth of important philosophical significance. When Coleridge describes the process of interpenetration,he places primary importance on the fact that reciprocation is only possible because a fundamental life process

19 LS, p. 72.

2 O ibid.

42 is common to biological and psychological functions:

[Man discovers] that the reality, the objective truth, of the objects he has been adoring, de­ rives its whole and sole evidence from an obscure sensation, ••• which compels him to contemplate as without and independent of himself what yet he could not contemplate at all, were it not a modi- f ication.. o fh'is own b'eing. 21

The 'two contrary powers' which are in evidence here, Coleridge else- where describes as our ability to 'at once identify our being with

that of the world without us, and yet [to] place ourselves in contra­

distinction to that world'. 22 In man, therefore, the potentiality

for unification is greater than elsewhere in Nature.

[Man] has a whole world in counter-point to him, but he oontains an entire world within himself ••• In man the centripetal and individualising tendency of all Nature is itself concentred and individualised. 23

The offspring of the union of these two tendencies is the increased

significance which the mind thenceforward attributes to the natural world until, at the apex of its own growth process, the mind discerns

spiritual presence in phenomenal nature. By the 'interpenetration of

man and nature' , then, is God made manifest to man and he is simul-

taneously given to understand that intelligence in the human mind is

'above Nature' by virtue of his added gift of consciousness. The

final proposition is stated clearly in the Biographia:

The theory of natural philosophy would then be completed, when all nature was dem:>nstrated to be identical in essence with that, which in its

21 Friend, I, 509. 22 Friend, I, 497. 23 TL, p. 601.

43 highest known power exists in man as intelligence and self-consciousness. 24

A belief in the pre-eminence of human mental potential is

at the root of Coleridge's philosophical enquiry, whether in the

field of metaphysics, aesthetics or of science. 25 It follows from

such a belief that the manifestation of the infinite and eternal in

the universe depends directly upon human interpretation. In one of

Coleridge's typically 'unscientific' passages he describes the ex­ perience of reoognition which may accompany a growing understanding

of natural phenomena.

In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking for, a symbolical' language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling as if the new phenomena were the dim awakening of a forgotten or hidden truth of my own nature. 26

Coleridge's experience here conveys how a living mind in interaction

with a living world creates a total experience out of its own essence,

whatever that is. When the mind is sterile, through bigotry or pre­

judice,then nodal growth is stunted so that the birth of no new mental

experiences is possible and the phenomenal world is reduced to an alien

and disconnected structure. And the problems of such a mental state are

24 BL, I, 176. I.A. Richard's standard discussion of Coleridge's philoso- phical theory of perception ("The Coalescence of Subject and Object," Richards,pp.44-71) is still of interest in this context, though the main issues, especially as argued in Biographia Literaria, Chapter xii, have recently been given full treatment in the light of Coleridge's mar­ ginalia by Owen Barfield: see Barfield, pp.59-68. 25 Norman Fruman observes that Coleridge was not a scientist because he always approached scientific data with metaphysical assumptions de­ rived from emotional interpretations of experience. This is largely true and it earns Coleridge Fruman's condemnation {op.cit., p.129), but as a method it also, of course, provided Coleridge with some of his most valuable insights. 26 Notebooks, II, 2546. the central concern of Coleridge's own personal statement, Dejection:

An Ode. The vicissitudes of his life did not, however, irrevocably

destroy his belief in the supremacy of the mind over nature. He seems

always to have felt that for the ease and promotion of healthy mental

development a 'due balance' has to be achieved 'between our attention

to outward objects and our meditation on inward thoughts' •27 Out of

this balance and interaction new growth is possible, but always, for

Coleridge, with the emphasis on the antecedent principle which exists

in the mind. By means of this principle, which is the mind's natural

tendency to unification, the disparate elements of experience are fused

to become a new stage in the process of thought.

The philosophical isolation of this 'principle' or antecedent

condition of growth, afforded Coleridge emotional satisfaction because

it made individuality the cause as well as the effect of mental develop­

ment. And being finally productive of spiritual apprehension, the prin­

ciple itself was conceived to be spiritual in origin, operating by recog­

nition of its own essence in nature, with God as alpha and omega. In

this way organicism offered Coleridge a way of envisaging the total

uni verse as a living unity. A world composed of autonomous mechanical

systems leaves man at the mercy of unrelated existential truths and

deprives him of that 'antecedent light' which Coleridge mentions in his

Table Talk, without which 'all the materials in the world are useless•. 28

Muirhead has commented that the theory of association denied Coleridge

the possibility of transcendentalism29 and it certainly did not offer

27 SC, I, 34. 28 IS, p.122. 29 op.cit., pp.42-45. H.N. Fairchild presents -the wider view in "Hartley, Pistorius and Coleridge'; see above p. 2 ln.

45 him a structure by which to organise and explore the kind of spiritual experience which was familiar to him. To that extent it debased for him both the operations of nature and the activities of the htnnan mind.

In particular, mechanism precluded for Coleridge the special human quality of free-will, which he understood as 'that which originates an

act or state of Being' • 30 This is the quality which, for Coleridge,

constitutes the very 'essence' of the man, that pre-existing tendency

to growth which makes him specifically himself and at the same time

universally human. The individual manifestation of such growth

Coleridge labels 'existence' in order to distinguish it from the essen-

tial man:

Essence, in its primary signification, means the principle of individuation, the inmost principle of the possibility of any thing, as that particular thing •.• Existence, on the other hand, is distinguished from essence, by the superinduction of reality. 31

An all-inclusive metaphysical system like this is conducive to security

and joy because its emphasis upon an omnipresent organizing principle promotes confidence in the multifarious vital forces at work in the uni­ verse. At times of depression and emotional insecurity, natural pheno­ mena can take on the aspect of chaos and imply an ever-increasing dis­

integration of harmonic relations. But the transcendental world-view

sponsors great delight in the variety of experience; the greater the

seeming chaos, the more various the raw materials for assimilation into

new order. Such a theory was naturally attractive to Coleridge in the

context of mental experience.

30 IS, p.131. 31 BL, II, 47.

46 Coleridge's definition of the inherent principle of life was not simply a denial of mechanism. It constituted a positive base in which the structure of individual growth, in particular the

growth of the mind, could be grounded. Mental growth begins when potential is vitalized by stimulation and a unique structure results.

For this process, by which the possibility of the living organism is

transformed to identity, Coleridge adopted the term 'individuation',

as the forming mind retains its uniqueness through all stages of sub­

sequent growth. Clearly, then, much may be learned about individua­

tion and the nature of mental growth, by observing their rudimentary operations in the child, where changing patterns are most clearly

evident. Again Coleridge was quick to recognise this intellectually

even as he was spontaneously drawn to observe and to identify with his

own children in their psychological development. In his respect for

the formative stages of personality, Coleridge shows himself remark­

ably in advance of his time,pre-figuring in many ways the work of

Freud and Jung. In particular he understood with Wordsworth the impor­

tance of the fact that 'the child is father of the man'. In childhood

the organising principle operates at its most basic level of assimila­

tion so that the evolving structure of mental activity can be clearly

discerned. Coleridge seems to have had natural ability in analysing

the kind of simple situations which reveal the nature of childish

thinking and he frequently endorsed his philosophical theories with

evidence from his observation.

In a passage in one of his notebooks, Coleridge explores

the experience of 'self' with the insight which results from his pe­

culiar blend of observation and introspection.

47 Two things we may learn from little children from 3 to 6 years old - 1. that it is a character, an instinct of our human Nature, to pass out of our self ..• All acts proceed from Self (here Self means the Principium Individualitatis) therefore all acts proceed to Self (here Self means the representative image). 32

The Freudian element in this comment is apparent33 and with even more recent significance, its central distinction between Self as

'Principium Individualitatis' and Self as 'representative image' recalls R.D. Laing's differentiation between 'experience' and 'be- h aviour' I in • psych' ic awareness. 34 In Coleridge's 'equivocque or double meaning of Self' we can identify the primary importance of the antecedent spiritual principle which is latent until evolving into forms of consciousness. This latent energy is the mind's ten­ dency to unification, the 'Principium Individualitatis', in which our individual direction of growth is contained. In the process of growth itself, as Coleridge notes, the impetus from the initial prin­ ciple is transformed into acts of the mind through assimilation of the world without, producing a passing 'out of our self' so that we are then seen 'to exist in the form of others•. 35 In Laing's termi­ nology the 'representative image' constitutes our 'behaviour' or that which is experienced by others as 'ourselves'. In this activity,

Coleridge explains above, we are fulfilling 'an instinct of our human

Nature'. But the process does not stop there, and the passage con- tinues:

32 IS, p.68. 33 Kathleen Coburn entitles the passage, "The Id, The Ego and The Super­ Ego." 34 See The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1967; rpt. Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 15-19. 35 IS, p.68.

48 [Another] lesson, that innocent Childhood affords me, is ••• not to suffer any one form to pass into me and to become a usurping Self in the disguise of what the German patho­ logists call a fixed Idea •.• As sure as [this] is cyclical, and forms the ruling Eddy in our mind, so surely does it become the representa­ tive of our Self, and= Self. 36

As the Self as 'representative image' is developing through its inter­ penetration with other centres of growth, it becomes exposed to the danger of an over-balance of influence from without, thereby trans­ forming itself into a 'fixed idea'. This would not only kill the pos­ sibility for further growth in that direction, but, having taken over the 'representative of our Self', the usurping form would affect the total experience of Self in the mind so that all future mental acts would reflect its influence. 37 The possibility of an open mind is then lost and we are entrapped by what Blake called 'mind-forg' d manacles'. For Coleridge too, 'man begins to be free when he begins to examine' . 38 Freedom is only possible through unrestricted acts of the total, unified Self. The alternative is alienation from the source of Life itself, sterility of growth and loss of all individual exis- tence.

The 'principle of individuation' is made manifest by the birth of new thoughts or ideas in the mind as signification of the presence of life. It emanates from the depths of the Self, disclosing

'itself from within as a principle of unity in the many ••• or the power which unites a given all into a whole that is presupposed by

36 IS, pp.68-69. 37 Coleridge describes a similar cyclical procedure in the possible corruptibility of the will; see below, Chapter IV, p. 71. 38 IS, p. 91.

49 all its parts'. 39 Clearly, then, the process of individuation is

itself a unification and it operates by synthesizing the opposing powers of mind and nature: the 'tendency to individuate cannot be

conceived without the opposite tendency to connect 1 • 40 The value of mental growth therefore lies in the perfect combination of 'Self'

and other (or not-Self) by which Nature effects 'her ultimate pro­

duction of the highest and most comprehensive individuality'. 41

Man must ' dare to commune with [his] very and permanent self' as

the 'previous condition of all insight into truth' ; 42 he must also

join with the whole of creation which is groaning for the power of

'retiring into that image, which is its substantial form and true

life, from the vanity of Self, which then only is when for itself it hath ceased to be'. 43 The dominance of the 'representative image' is always to be feared as the paralyser of the productive powers,

and the man whose growth is 'ossified by the continual reaction and

assimilating influences of mere objects on his mind, and who is a prisoner to his own eye and its reflex' 44 becomes an object of horror

to Coleridge. The irony, of course, is that he became such a man him­ self and was therefore all the more able to analyse the condition of

suspended imaginative productivity.

The progressive life of the mind is all important to

Coleridge because ever greater scope is offered by the realization

39 TL, p. 573. 40 TL, p. 578. 41 ibid. 42 Friend, I, 115. 43 LS, p. 90. 44 TL, p. 583.

50 of each successive stage in the process of individuation. In The

Statesman's Manual he describes a 'living GERM', 'that hidden mystery

in every, the minutest, form of existence', in which 'the Present in­

volves the Future'. 45 In the process of its growth, this germ 'pre­

sents itself to the understanding retrospectively, as an infinite

ascent of causes, and prospectively as an interminable progression

of effects'. 46 Each mental act is embryonic, promising further ful-

filment of potential, and in each rebirth intensity is increased

through refinement of capability. There is continual metamorphosis whilst ever there is progression, as each newly-won power surrenders

itself at the node in its 'Yearning' for growth. In his notes on

the development of the flower, Coleridge fancifully uses this term

'yearning' to denote the opening up and transformation of one part

of the growing organism into its subsequent stage, a procedure which

he describes as 'sacrificial'. 'Yearning,' he says, 'offers up, re-

signs itself passes wholly into another.' 47 It is this activity

which provides the paradigm for the growth of the mind or, more overt­

ly, the development of intelligence. It is in the nature of the whole

process that the higher mental powers are dependent for their intensity

upon power in the lower ones. 48

'Intelligence' is for Coleridge one of the supreme goals of

human endeavour and, resulting from the process of individuation as it

does, it can be seen to relate directly to human individuality. Nowhere

45 LS, p.49.

4 G ibid. 47 IS, p.224. 48 See above Chapter II,pp. 24-25.

51 is this more apparent than in the mental life of the child. Coleridge's observation of children revealed to him their initial habitation of a world prescribed by the senses, a world of imitation. He shows with great accuracy the limitations of that sensual state of mind which precedes the formation of the faculty of Understanding, relating how a child delights in a simple story, fully understanding each part but without the ability to relate the parts or to draw conclusions. 49 The child is here at a low stage in intellectual development, one from which he is to grow to intelligence. Such intelligence is, however, not an attainment grasped nor a skill mastered but rather a revelation in the form of the realization of inherent potential •

••• sensation itself is but vision nascent, not the cause of intelligence, but intelligence itself revealed as an earlier ~ower in the process of self-construction. 5

We are again reminded of the importance of Self as 'Principium Indivi­ dualitatis' and the process of mental development is seen in terms of

the freedom to distil the mind out of its own essence. Intelligence is 'a self-development, not a quality supervening to a substance' 51 and therefore the cultivation of intelligence, or education, demands

a special approach. Education may not be effected by random exposure

to stimuli without disregard for the concept of value in the direction of progression52 and for the special potential of the child concerned.

In a lecture advocating a 'New System of Education', Coleridge shows

remarkable sensitivity in observing of Education that:

49 See IS, p.204. 50 BL, I, 187-188. 51 ibid. 52 See above p. 38for Coleridge's ironical comment to John Thelwall on the importance of sustaining value through education. William Walsh has drawn attention to this point in "Coleridge on Childhood," The Use of Imagination (London, 1959), p.22. ••• it was to educe, to call forth; as the blossom is educed from the bud, the vital excellencies are within ••. There might be idiots but there [are] no dunces .•• for, in a state of progression, the art is to begin low enoui~---the level of capacity must be found.

In such a system, uniqueness is recognised and celebrated; the living man can grow, offering his own contribution to the variety of natural fonns.

If education is 'self-development',it must be organized as a fonn of personal exploration. Having conceived of the nature of the growth of the mind in specific terms, Coleridge identifies the primary concerns of education as the awakening of the principle and method of growth. Just as in his metaphysical and religious speculations, he continues to emphasise the search for the 'truth within'. Here in the field of education the transcendental bias is particularly fruitful; it leads Coleridge to feel that learning can only be achieved in terms of total personality, that acts of mechanical mental adeptness finally produce only slick accomplishments and a surrendering of the growing organism for the limited productivity of the machine. In The Statesman's

Manual he reacts strongly against the eighteenth century sciences of classification and declares that they have purchased a few brilliant inventions at the loss of all corrnnunion with life and the spirit of nature.' 54 Coleridge reasserts the value of unconditioned response and expounds clearly that to awaken t..~e dormant principle of organic growth is

53 IS, p.84. 54 LS, p.76. to open anew a well of springing water, not to ••• fill, bucket by bucket, the leaden cistern; ••• not to assist in storing the passive mind with the various sorts of knowledge most in request, as if the human soul were a mere repository or banqueting room, but to place it in such relations of circumstance as should gradually excite the germinal power that craves no knowledge but what it can take up into itself, what it can appropriate, and re-produce in fruits of its own. 55

If, in the process of education, subject matter is conned as factual material for subsequent reproduction and it is retained by the indi­ vidual without integration into the personality, the natural process of growth from assimilation is prevented, no 'fruit' is produced and all possible extension of the inner 'self' is denied. Subject matter should constitute no more than stimulus to self-discovery, and we should place it 'among the means of education, instead of regarding

it as the end' . 56 Coleridge continues, 'At no time and in no rank of

life can knowledge be made our prime object without injury to the understanding.' There is nice irony for us, some one hundred and

fifty years later, in the ensuing comment: 'the neglect of this truth

is the worm at the root of certain modern improvements in the modes of

. ,57 t each ing ••. The principle of life is not fostered by the compart- mentalised learning techniques which are the common experience of

both Coleridge and the modern schoolboy.

It is worth noting at this point how valuable the structured

conception of mental growth is in forming the basis for Coleridge's

specific recommendations in practical issues such as that of education.

55 Friend I, 472-473. 56 IS, p.81. Walsh also emphasises this aspect of Coleridge's educational theory, with special reference to teacher training; see "Coleridge and the Education of Teachers," The Use of Ima.gination, pp.54-56.

S 7 ibid.

c;4 The component parts of the plant and mind are not given the same

detailed analysis as is the activity by which they propagate life.

In this Coleridge makes his intention clear:

The basis of my philosophy ••• is not in a fact impressed, much less in a generalisation from facts collectively ••. , I place my principle in an act, but the act involves its own reality. 58

In discussing the aesthetic implications of Coleridge's theory, M.H.

Abrams somewhat over-simplifies the application of the analogy in

identifying an end-product, a given 'whole' or 'terminus' which con­ stitutes the 'achieved structure' wrought by the process of unification. 59

To me, Coleridge's emphases dispute this. His famous 'unity in multeity' is conceived in terms of movement: 'The End is in the Means' , 60 or, in other words, the parts of a living whole are 'so far interdependent

that each is reciprocally means and end'. 61 The only conclusion of the

vegetable process is further reproduction as its own fruit is transformed

to seed, and the growth of the mind has already been shown to be cyclical

in the interaction of influence envisaged in the dual nature of the self.

Even those recognisable products of mental unity which Coleridge reveres,

'thought' and 'idea', are conceived in significantly fluid terms.

Coleridge shows logical consistency in 'recommending an observance of

the laws of nature in the Education of Children' 62 and in concentrating

his interest upon the method of encouraging fruitful learning.

58 Quoted by Muirhead, 012_. Ci t. I p.105. 59 Abrams, p.174. 60 IS, p.143. 6 1 TL, p.574. 62 IS, p. 89.

CC In The Friend Coleridge spends some time discussing the importance of 'scientific method' and in analysing the qualities which betray certain types of mental organization. In one particu­ larly illuminating passage he gives an account of the growth process and draws attention to the progression of activities experienced by the developing intellect.

We are aware that it is with our congni tions as with our children. There is a period in which the method of nature is working for them; a period of aimless activity and unregulated accumulation, during which it is enough if we can preserve them in health and out of harm's way. Again, there is a period of orderliness, of circum­ spection, of discipline, in which we purify, separate, define, select, arrange and settle the nomenclature of communication. There is also a period of dawning and twilight, a period of anticipation affording trials of strength. And all these ••• will precede the attain­ ment of a scientific METHOD. 63

The first stage is the 'method of nature' which is that of varied and unlimited stimulation. The child (or developing intellect) is restric­ ted to the operations of the senses by which the mind is filled with the wonder of unrelated facts and images. The mind is then prevented from becoming a victim of knowledge without learning, by its freedom to see connections and to explore relationships as the faculty of understanding is developed. The final stages of growth, however, can only be attained by that special process which Coleridge assignes to the imagination, whereby the insignia of experience are dissolved in order to be recreated in terms of the total personality.

One of the interes.ting points emerging from the above passage is Coleridge's awareness of the unforced and leisurely way in which the

63 Friend, I, 499.

56 complete learning process must be effected. The art of the 'method' is to let nature take its course so that the propagation of new life evolves spontaneously and gently from the action of stimulation on inherent impulse. Those who continually busy their minds with forced activity do not allow for the moment of birth, when fertile relaxation finally produces a new form of existence out of the essence of the mind itself. Elsewhere Coleridge makes a beautifully pointed analogy:

Touch a door a little ajar, or half open, and it will yield to the push of your finger. Fire a cannon-ball at it, and the Door stirs not an inch: you make a hole thro' it, the door is spoilt for ever, but not moved. 64

The best 'method' of education is to allow the mind to follow its own inclination in terms of both direction and pace, for only in this way can there be an encouragement of that 'progressive transition' which is the very nature of method itself. 65

As I.A. Richards has shown most clearly, ever increasing self­

consciousness provides, for Coleridge, signposts indicating stages in

the progress of mental growth. 66 In a passage in the Biographia

Literaria Coleridge describes the development of the 'Inner sense' and

self-awareness, and he presents a peak of attainment as man's ability

to reflect on his own reflections. 67 Richards has pointed out (p.47)

that loose introspection contains its own dangers, but that Coleridge

is concerned with the self-realization which comes with distinct con-

sciousness. Coleridge stresses the importance of bringing to distinct-

64 IS, p.81. 65 Friend, I, 45 7. 66 Richards, pp. 44-50. 67 BL, I, 172.

57 ness those things which one has long known in the dim regions of semi­

conscious awareness: 'I know much that I do not understand;' he says,

but to understand what I know (scire me scire) is ••• the aim of all liberal Education as far as the Intellect is concerned. The very word implies it - for the mind is educed, drawn forth, or developed, in exact proportion as the consciousness is extended. 68

Only through unclouded recognition of the Self as 'representative image'

can man begin to come to terms with the deeper unconscious forces of

the self which are groping towards fulfilment through growth, and in this maturation lies the wonder of the learning process. William Walsh suggests that it is the business of education in any age to enrich the image of self by fostering imaginative participation in many modes of being, giving the teacher the chance to sense, and to encourage, the movements of the deeper self. 69 The act of learning for the child is

contained in the active creation of a new self; as Richards puts it, knowing is 'a kind of making, i.e. the bringing into being of what is known', an act of self-realization (p.49). And for Coleridge, 'That, which we find in ourselves, is (gradu mutate) the substance and the

life of all our knowledge. 170 Richards' important point still needs

to be repeated here, that for Coleridge it is the function of the imagi­

nation in its capacity for unification and recreation, to transform

'knowledge' to 'growledge', to give the whole mind increased possibility

for growth by extending the products and therefore the productivity of

consciousness. 71 68 IS, p.90. 69 Op.cit. I p.15. 70 LS, p. 78. 71 The consistency of Coleridge's views on education, with obvious rele­ vance to mental growth, is confirmed by textual material contained in LL, especially pp.40-49 and in Lucy E. Watson's Coleridge at Highgate (London,1925),pp.74ff. The following discussions of Coleridge's philo­ sophy of education are also appropriate: A.S. Byatt, Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time (London,1970),pp.162-198; Kathleen Coburn, The Self-Conscious Imagination (London,1974),pp.46-51; Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood (1957;rpt.Harmondsworth,1967),pp.68-90; Nora Sinclair, "Coleridge and Education," Q.Q., 74, 413-426. The clarity conferred by the 'common consciousness' offers,

then, insights which are of particular value because of their connec-

72 tions with 'master-currents below the surface' w While Coleridge

celebrated 'distinctness' of thought as necessary to the educated man, he saw that this, if allowed to dominate and to control future pro- gression, could reduce all mental activity to mechanical association.

Of distinct and clear conceptions he said that ' ••• it requires the in­

fluence of a light and warmth, not their own, to make them crystallize into a semblance of growth'. 73 Thus the germinative influence of un-

conscious drives is not undervalued. Indeed the 'master-currents' are clearly related to those rivers in the 'scanty vale of human life' whose sources are 'far higher and far inward' in the realms of the

'faculty divine'. 7 1+ In the 'referring of the mind to its own conscious­ ness' Coleridge's aim is 'to project the spirit, to make the reason

spread light over our feelings, to make our feelings, with their vital warmth, actualize, our reason... I 7 5 The 'feelings' are thus forming the

link between the unknown spiritual principle which gives each man his

unique potential, and that area of conscious thought which represents his growth. Conceptually this is important to Coleridge, for as already noted, emotion is seen to be frequently a pre-condition of thought. On

considering 'What is forgetfulness?', he comments:

Renew the state of affection or bodily Feeling, same or similar - sometimes dimly similar/ and instantly the trains of forgotten Thought rise f rom their . 1 iving· . Catacoomb s! 76

72 BL, I, 167. 7 3 LS, p. 23. 71+ BL, I, 166. 75 Friend, I, 108. 76 AP, p.B.

59 Feeling is therefore an integral component in the unification of the total personality providing the context for new growth and creativity.

Coleridge wrote to of his firm opinion 'that deep Thinking is attainable only by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation'~ 77

Because of his respect for the value of emotion, one must not suspect Coleridge of neglecting its dangers. He saw that although dis­ tinct notions without feeling produce sterility, similarly if emotions are allowed to dominate, they show themselves antithetical to clarity and leave man at the mercy of 'obscure ideas'. 78 In particular Coleridge is wary of uncontrolled passion as preventive of rather than conducive to mental growth. An interesting distinction between emotion and passion emerges as we realize that, while the emotional state may pre­ cede the generation of ideas, passion is often a direct result of it.

'A passion is a state of emotion having its immediate cause not in

Things, but in our Thoughts of the Things,' he once wrote. 79 In domi­ nance, therefore, passion over-rules the mind as the product of growth, without itself containing seeds for further development. No balance is achieved for future generation because the rational man is completely deposed, and all further avenues to the spiritual self are blocked. So,

for the productive growth of the mind, feeling must be allowed to rise

from within, offering fertile ground for germination without allowing

its own transformation into an overruling power of passion.

77 CL, II, 709. 78 IS, p.58. 79 IS, p.66.

60 I hope by now to have established that the gradual develop­ ment of innate potential was for Coleridge a central function of the

living man. He came to see self-knowledge as the key to the unfolding of the possible in the actual, the 'essence' in the 'existence', and

as our only direct link with the spritual world from which we derive our very energy of life. Out of the 'act and evolution of self-con- sciousness', he says, we can investigate an absolute 'principium cog­ noscendi'. 80

We begin with the I KNOW MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I AM. We proceed from the SELF, in order to lose and find all self in GOD. 81

Thus for Coleridge the possibilities inherent in the learning process

are ordained by God so that we might eventually reach full apprehension of Him within ourselves. I do not wish to enlarge upon Coleridge's re­

ligious convictions in any detail, except to note that, when its end is spiritual apprehension, the learning process is inescapably also a pro-

cess of moral development. For Coleridge a true grasp of knowledge

oould not exist outside a moral framework; he would not accept the 'Dr.

Faustus' figure of the hyper-intelligent atheist as exhibiting true genius.

Man's greatness must be measured in terms of growth and the ascending pro­

cess of organic development represents for him the total journey by which man is able to find himself in God, the resulting state being 'an entire

assent of the mind; to a •.. positive inward knowledge by experience of

the mystery of God'. 82 This 'entire assent of the mind' is achieved by

an all-inclusive act of mental power which Coleridge understood to be

80 BL, I, 186. 81 ibid. 82 LS, p. 46.

61 the best work of the imagination, the sole faculty of human creativity.

Man and God coalesce in the act so that man's experience of his own existence is simultaneously his experience of God, his creativity is equally that of God and his growth towards understanding of the world without becomes a fuller and finer grasp of the truth within. CHAPTER IV NODES OF GROWTH: WILL, REASON, IMAGINATION, As a result of his interpretation of mental activity in the light of developing ideas of value, Coleridge came to place great impor­ tance upon certain psychological functions and to identify them accor­ ding to his conception of their operations. In particular he labels three faculties of specific importance, will, reason and imagination, and in his later prose he returns again and again to these concepts in various attempts to clarify and define their roles in mental activity.

In general his terms are not clear, though it gradually becomes apparent that much of the confusion results from his attempting to work out static definitions for faculties which he conceives to be existent only in the process of change. In applying the model of organic growth to psycho­ logical creativity, Coleridge seems to envisage the functions of these three major faculties as nodal, each coming into existence under the impetus of the inherent principle of growth within the mental activity, and operating at that point in the process from which the new growth is to spring. To define such faculties in isolation from each other is, in the final analysis, impossible, since their functions overlap and absorb each other. What Coleridge does is to describe each in distinction from the others, working towards their synthesis. In this respect commenta- tors have frequently accused him of employing a 'faculty psychology' in the service of a philosophy of mind characterised by unity, 1 but Coleridge

1 The standard criticism is that made by Alice Snyder in 1929 in which Coleridge is guilty of 'accepting a "faculty psychology" that actually belied his own conception of the organic unity of living processes.' (LL,p.15) Stephen Prickett describes this comment as 'very just' (p.56) and it is strongly endorsed by Norman Fruman who declares, 'Coleridge was addicted to distinctions of this class, the paradoxical tendency of which is to destroy the organic unity of the mind••• He never grasped the mechanistic implications in his continual references to the separate facul­ ties of the mind and his assertions of absolute distinctions in their ope­ rations.' (op.cit., p.183) And from an examination of "S.T. Coleridge: His Theory of Knowledge" (T.W.A., 47[1958] ,221-232), Joan Larsen concludes that Coleridge's 'various categories of thought and existence .•• all be­ come attempts to separate artificially what is inseparable.' (p.231)

63 clearly shows that he is aware of the risks of describing process in terms of a series of steps. He says in The Friend:

Distinct notions do not suppose different things. When I make a ••• distinction in human nature, I am fully aware that it is a distinction, not a division, and that in every act of mind the man unites the properties ••• Nevertheless it is of great practical importance, that these distinctions should be made and understood. 2

And again in the Biographia the point is made with respect to philosophi- cal investigation:

••• it is the privilege of the philosopher to pre­ serve himself constantly aware, that distinction is not division. In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy. But having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions to the unity, in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of philosophy. 3

The most salient criticism of Coleridge is not that he mistakes the actual nature of mental organization but rather that he does not set out to write about complex psychological processes with any clear idea of his conclu- sions so his reader is left to interpret his vision from an accumulation of discursive emphases.

The faculties of imagination and reason which are integral to

Coleridge's conception of mental growth and propagation have received much critical attention. The will is equally important in the generation

2 Friend, I, 177n. 3 BL, II, B. See also the discussion of reason, religion and will in The Statesman's Manual where Coleridge says that 'each of the three, though a distinct agency, implies and demands the other two, and loses its own nature at the moment that from distinction it passes into division or separation.' (LS, p.62) Some of this material is used in strong support of Coleridge's method in Barfield, pp.18-20.

64 of new thought, yet it has proved of less concern to commentators even though I.A. Richards pointed out its importance in 1934. 4 It is easy to confuse Coleridge's use of the tenn 'will' with his 'volition' or with the 'conscious faculty of choice'. On closer examination the tennis seen to embrace much greater complexity than this, a comple­ xity which is again related to Coleridge's need to identify a vital and unique force at work in the growth of personality. He located a personal and intelligent vitality in the will by analysing the ways in which his own mind worked. I have already noted that when concent­ rating his mind upon thought itself, he became aware that in this acti­ vity one loses the clarity of intellectual definition, that, in his words, the 'idea' becomes dim, but that always present is a deep and distinct notion of oneself, a feeling in which the percipient and the perceived are united. In this feeling he recognises the 'I', 'our life',

'ourselves'. 5 This is as close as Coleridge can come to direct expe- rience of that 'principle' of individuality which he placed in the growth process, that is, the latent potential of the mind-as-seed. But this experience itself provides evidence of its own power and signifi- cance, even though constituting little more than a vague and indefinable feeling.

'It••• abides in the dark ground-work of our nature, to crave an outward confirmation of that something within us, which is our very self, that something, not made up of our qualities and relations, but itself the supporter and substantial basis of all these. 6

4 Richards, p.xv. 5 Notebooks, I, 921. Fairly recently J.A. Appleyard has commented on the personality of will, suggesting that the concept of will-as-self was forming in Coleridge's mind about 1803 to 1804: op.cit., pp. 101- 102. 6 BL, II, 188.

65 At some point of my being, he felt, I am outside experience, a source and surveyor of my own destiny, even as at other points I am inextri- cably tangled in and moulded by the events of my life. A complex of intellective abilities such as this, then, gives him freedom to act in accordance with his understanding of the best or the worst in his own nature, demanding consequentially a recognition of moral respon- sibility. His experience of guilt as I have already suggested, led him to acknowledge his own freedom and responsibility for action, and his 'Confessio Fidei' begins confidently:

I believe that I am a free agent, inasmuch as, and so far as, I have a will which renders me justly respon­ sible for my actions, omissive as well as commissive. 7

This function of will Coleridge eventually extended as he experienced an intellectual dissatisfaction with associationism.

Without any organizing or regulating principle in the mind, the opera- tions of association must be indiscriminate.

Either the ideas ..• will exactly imitate the order of the impression itself, which would be absolute delirium: or .•• any part of any impression might recall any part of any other, without a cause present to determine what it should be. 8

In the Biographia Literaria he cites the super-human reproductive me- mory of a mentally sick German girl as evidence for the conclusion that

'all thoughts are in themselves imperishable' and that it is theoreti­

cally possible'to bring before every human soul the collective expe­

rience of its own past existence' (I, 80). Quite obviously the result

7 Notebooks, III, 4005. 8 BL, I, 77.

66 of such completeness of memory could only be confusion, a state which

Coleridge found inherently painful. 9 Undoubtedly to have a mind so filled with the minutiae of experience would be to cloud the knowledge of one....,self which is normally possible. Aldous Huxley in The Doors of

Perception speaks of the same state of mind as 'Mind-at-Large' and suggests that perhaps a complex valve-like operation controls the transfer of thought patterns from the unconscious to the conscious mind. 1 ° For Coleridge this valve is an 'intelligent faculty' by whose agency thoughts take their form and become the person which we experience within ourselves. The organizing principle is the 'free will', 'our only absolute self'. 11 Its function is to work through all acts of thought and attention so as 'to control, determine and modify the phan­ tasmal chaos of association'. It is always 'co-extensive and co-present': in other words it comes into operation with the formation of thought and is active on conscious and unconscious levels.

The most satisfying aspect of this account of the will is that it identifies the nature and activity of the 'absolute self' while leaving its exact mode of operation a mystery. As a thought may only be said to be 'I thinking' , 12 then the faculty by which my thoughts are given shape is integral to my definition of myself. And in a notebook entry to Sara Hutchinson,Coleridge describes will as 'strictly synony­ mous with the individualizing Principle, the I of every rational Being.•13

9 See BL, II, 208. 1 0 The Doors of Pexce£tion (1954;xpt.with Heaven and Hell, Haxmondswoxth, 1971), pp.21-25. 1 1 BL, I, BO. 12 IS, p. 30. 1 3 Quoted by House, p. 155.

67 The theory of association, on the other hand, explains the method by which ideas or impressions are associated but it does not finally identify the cause. Of course Coleridge himself cannot hope to do this, but by extending the function of the will, he feels himself to be a little closer •

••• whatever makes certain parts of a total impression more vivid or distinct than the rest, will detennine the mind to recall these in preference to others equally linked together by the common condition of contemporaneity, or ••• of continuity. But the will itself by confining and intensifying the attention may arbitrarily give vividness or distinctness to any object whatsoever. 14

In this way the workings of the will, by mysterious and self-defined processes of selection, deny that 'blind and lifeless mechanism' accorded to the mind by Hartley. There is an evident distinction be­ tween this fonnative function of the will and that deliberate focus of attention upon a given subject which initiates much psychological creati­ vity. In the Biographia Coleridge quotes his earlier account of 'the soul and its organs of sense' in which he differentiates the will, which he labels a 'practical reason', from the 'faculty of choice' and from the 'sensation of volition' both of which function specifically in the consciousness (I, 193-194). Again in a letter of 1814 'Volition' is described as the 'faculty instrumental to the Will and by which alone the Will can realize itself - it's Hands, Legs, & Feet, as it were•. 15

The creative role of volitional consciousness will be discussed more fully later with respect to art; from a psychological viewpoint it is apparent that Coleridge understood the will to be above all a directing

14 BL, I, 87.

15 CL, II, 489-90.

68 faculty working throughout the whole range of conscious and unconscious acts of mind. 16 In struggling towards definition he once suggests that there is 'a will within the will, that forms the basis of choice and the succedaneum of instinct, which the conscious choice will perfect into knowledge.' 17

In some of its more remote and complex modes of operation, then, the will may be known only by its effects, by those thoughts and actions which are the results of its activity. From the substance of thought we may understand more about the nature of will. In pursuing this line of inquiry in the Biographia, Coleridge again seems to be seeking a rational explanation for feelings extracted from his own inner experience.

He quotes a passage from Plotinus which he then translates so as to empha- sise his meaning:

"Never could the eye have beheld the sun, had not its own essence been soliform," (i.e. pre-configured to light by a similarity of essence with that of light) "neither can a soul not beautiful attain to an intuition of beauty." (I, 80n)

The juxtaposition of this passage with the definition of free will as

'co-extensive, co-present', 'our only absolute self', reveals a train of thought, typically clouded though it is by the interjection that 'it is profanation to speak of these mysteries' (I, 80). It is implied that if

16 Appleyard has suggested that at times 'will' perhaps takes precedence over 'reason' as a directive force in behaviour: op.cit., p.102. 17 LL, p. 105. The subtle distinctions blurred by the repetition of the word 'choice' in this comment are further confused by Coleridge's in­ consistency. In the Aids to Reflection, for instance, when discussing instinct he says, 'There is selection, but not choice: volition rather than will.' (AR, p.163) Here 'volition' acts without consciousness and 'will' is simply synonymous with the conscious faculty of choice.

69 free will is the creator, whether directly or indirectly, of thoughts concerning the spiritual and 'celestial', it must itself be of the essence of the spiritual. Confirming this implication, Coleridge later speaks of the will as a 'self-conscious spirit' and analyses its activity in religious terms (I, 185). Here then is the refuta­ tion of the 'poor worthless I', the product of mechanism who seeks for

God through no agency of his own. Coleridge has explained the exis­ tence of 'an infinite spirit, of an intelligent and holy will' (I, 83), which, through feeling, he had long before located within himself.

Elsewhere he asks with rhetorical confidence, 'Is not our will itself a spiritual power? Is it not the spirit of the man?' 18 So the link between man's spiritual life and the concept of morality is forced in this depiction of a free will of spiritual essence which can yet de­ mand full recognition of responsibility for acts committed under its jurisdiction.

As the will is conceived to operate both with and without voluntary control, one of its potentials is to direct its own action knowingly towards self-seeking, thereby allowing for the emergence of evil. Coleridge shows concern in this respect. To him contemporary thirst for knowledge and respect for intellectual distinction had fostered the ideal of a highly developed itelligence at the expense of other faculties. Again in the Biographia he demonstrates that the quest for knowledge without the guidance of a finely balanced will can lead to the love and misuse of power, and 'of all power, that of the mind is, on every account, the great desideratum of human ambition'

(II, 189). To consider the intellect of man 'exclusively as a separate

18 Miscellanies, p. 171.

70 self-subsistence' rather than 'in its proper state of subordination to his own conscience or to the will of an infinitely superior being' (II,

189), is to remove the power of knowledge from the sphere of morality, to replace God with man. When Coleridge makes the note to explore the

'Origin of Moral Evil from the streamy nature of Association, which

Thinking curbs and rudders' , 19 he reveals his fear of totally undirected associative processes in which the balanced activity of the will is destroyed. And a similar concern is reflected in his comments on the old Spanish play Atheista Fulminate. Don Juan, the main character, is felt to carry 'into all its practical consequences, the doctrine of a

Godless nature. ' 2 0 His evil sterns from a too simple obedience to the law of nature in his own instinct.

"Self-contradiction is the only wrong! For, by the laws of spirit, in the right Is every individual character That acts in s tri et consistence with itself." 2 1

To Coleridge this philosophy is a wilful distortion of the potential of the whole man; it is a 'system of nature' which comprises nothing but

'materialism, with the utter rejection of moral responsibility. 122 Not only does it influence the actions of the individual but finally it can infect the will itself. Coleridge elsewhere makes the point that human will is not inviolable; herein lies some measure of its freedom.

Even the bestial life ••• may when awakened in the man and by h~s own act admitted into his will, become a spiritual influence. He receives a nature into his will, which by this very act becomes a corrupt will; and vice versa, this will becomes h1.s nature, and thus a corrupt nature. 23

19 Notebooks, I, 1770. 20 BL, II, 185. 21 BL, II, 186. 22 ibid. 2 3 Miscellanies, p. 171.

71 In emphasising the importance of the role of the will in the formation of human personality, Coleridge does not reject the theory of the association of ideas as an acceptable explanation for certain kinds of mental activity. His explorations lead him to ex­ tend the theory so as to include the initiating force of the mind.

The act of thinking should present two sides for oontemplation:

that of external causality, in which the train of thought may be considered as the result of outward impressions, of accidental combinations, of fancy, or the associations of memory, - and, on the other hand, that of internal causality, or of the energy of the will on the mind itself. 24

The similarity between the growth of thought and the process of orga- nic development is clearly evident in this description. The movement of thought takes form actively and passively, from within and from without, but it is always to some extent under the control of the will which is 'perhaps never wholly suspended' • 25 As thought evolves orga- nically, there is subtle interplay of conscious and unconscious proces- ses · in which the activity of the will is the mental correlative of the vital energy at work in nature. Consciously, thought is known by an act of the mind upon itself and furthermore, aspects of the man - ifold of mental experience lost to the conscious mind are re-introduced as conscious links in the chain of association. Coleridge expresses the need to make 'a full sharp distinction' between 'Mind' (in its to­ tality) and 'Consciousness' - 'the Consciousness being the narrow Neck of the bottle.' 26 The will is operative at the point where the un-

21t Miscellanies, p. 162. 25 BL, I, 77. 26 IS, p. 38.

72 conscious is given the form of consciousness. The pure energy which characterises thought must remain unknowable because always uncon­ scious. It gains fonn by the action of the will which is therefore the seat of peculiar identity and the instrument of all knowledge.

In this resolution of energy and control through the powers of the con­ scious and unconscious, Coleridge sees the full potential of human knowledge. He states:

.•. grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause the world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you. 27

These two forces 'counteract each other by their essential nature', 28 the first being dynamic and explosive, the second restraining, con­ fining and conducive to form. Both, however, are characterised by activity and in this they demonstrate their life.

It is to the 'divine and invisible life' that Coleridge in­ voluntarily returns in pursuing his interest in the activity of the mind. He evinces a sense of awe with regard to the unconscious, describing it in emotive terms as 'a darker power, deeper, mightier and more universal than the conscious intellect of man; than intelli­ gence.'29 From his own experience it had seemed as though some long sought-for memory could be thrust into the conscious mind by a seemingly alien power, as if 'some other unperceived had been employed in the same search'. 30 And a very significant feature of this process is

27 JiJL, I, 196. 28 BL, I, 197. 29 BL, II, 93. 30 Miscellanies, p. 252.

73 that it is, Coleridge notes, 'not assisted by any association, but the very contrary-by the suspension and sedation of all associations. 131

In its unconscious function the will acts prior to association, trans­ forming the energy of the unconscious into the fonns of consciousness.

And the process is not simply a twofold one. A name or an idea may be reborn to consciousness simply for the convenience of the discur- sive faculty but, where the will is fully developed, the rise of an intuitive and abstracting power in the unconscious may produce rather a specialised fonn of consciousness, extending human knowledge beyond that applicable to the understanding. For Coleridge, this is a 'philo­ sophic ••• consciousness, which lies beneath or (as it were) behind the spontaneous consciousness natural to all reflecting beings.' 32 All human knowledge exists in either the 'philosophic' or the 'spontaneous' consciousness, the former being 'exclusively the domain of PURE philo­ sophy'.33 It is in the 'philosophic' consciousness that man is able to conceive of the existence of that energetic spirit which is the source of 'philosophic' mental activity. As this is in its essence di- vine, then the will is again confirmed to be the link between that which is specifically human, the soul of man, and that which is forever un­ knowable and constitutes God. Coleridge embraces the full scope of his theory by uniting philosophic oonsciousness, free will, religion and morality in a fine analogy again taken from natural history:

3 l IS, p. 31. The importance of the involuntary memory in Coleridge's anticipation of modern psychology and in developing his own poetic is argued by K. Yura in "The Involuntary Memory as Discovered by S.T. Coleridge," S.E. Lit., 42, 133-143. 32 BL, I, 164. 3 3 ibid.

74 They and they only can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of self-intuition ... who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antennae yet to come. They know and feel, that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them! In short, all the organs of sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense; and we have it. All the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit: ..• and their first appearance discloses itself in the moral being. 34

By this process the hwnan will reaches its greatest potential, becoming

the agent whereby men may be brought to 'feel within themselves a some­

thing ineffably greater than their own individual nature'. 35 Coleridge

calls this the 'METHOD of the will' leading to a revelation of that 'one principle, which alone reconciles the man with himself, with others and with the world', the principle of religion. 36

Enlarging his concept of the spontaneous generation of the will in its valve-like capacity, Coleridge questioned the impetus to

spiritual knowledge which in some men remains forever dead and undeveloped.

By analysing his own thinking he judged that, in contradistinction to

knowledge gained by the 'spontaneous consciousness', that gained by 'phi­

losophic' experiment had always an intellectual or mental initiative.

In The Friend he considers the problems of a spiritual nature raised by

the mind and raises the query: 'What is it which gives birth to the

question?' (I, 490) It must be something free of the limitations of

the understanding and the phenomena of sense; in fact Coleridge feels it

not to be anything that can be known, although it ~ be recognised as

alien in 'all that each man calls exclusively himself' (I, 515). It is

34 BL, I, 167. 35 Friend, I, 514. 36 Friend, I, 523.

75 as if each man bears witness to this power in his own mind even as he does to light or to life, phenomena which are experienced within the mind yet whose sources are felt to be elsewhere. The experience of the subrational energy is Coleridge's 'lux intellectus, lumen siccum, the pure and impersonal reason' (I, 490). This is expressed most clearly in The Statesman's Manual:

We speak of ourselves as possessing reason; and this we cannot otherwise define than as the capability ••• of beholding, or being conscious of, the divine light. But this very capability is itself that light, not as the divine light, but as the life or indwelling of the living Word, which is our light; that is, a life whereby we are capable of the light, and by which the light is present to us, as a being which we may call ours, but which I cannot call mine: for it is the life that we individualize, while the light, as its corre 1 a t ive. opposi"t e, remains. universa. . 1 37

Coleridge's most famous definition of the faculty of reason helps a great deal towards our understanding of the term:

Reason is the Power of Universal and necessary Convictions, the Source and Substance of Truths above Sense, and having their evidence in thernselves. 38

Reason is thus an aid to knowledge, constituting in itself a 'power', a

'source' and a 'substance'. As the 'power of universal and necessary convictions' reason is experienced as the energy in the 'philosophic consciousness', given its embodiment in thought by the activity of the will. Interestingly reason itself is also the source of this power; that is, it exists primarily in the unconscious and is 'pre-eminently spiritual and a spirit' • 39 A distinction in the nature of reason arises when it is seen to be both a 'source' and a 'substance'. It

37 LS, pp. 68-69n. 38 AR, p. 143. 39 AR, p. 144.

76 changes its nature depending upon the objects to which it is directed.

When the energy of reason is applied to facts of experience, reason

is seen to be the source of knowledge, and therefore, since it con-

cerns itself only with 'universals and necessities', to be 'Speculative•. 40

When, on the other hand, reason is applied to itself or to the 'growth

or offspring of reason', becoming at once source and substance, its

truth is absolute and Coleridge calls it 'Practical Reason' with Kant.

As man's grasp of any truth is dependent upon the activity of the will

and yet the will is known to promote thought which is frequently outside

the scope of the spiritual, so Coleridge conceives of pure reason 'as

designed to regulate the will'. 41 It becomes the responsibility of man

to acknowledge the spiritual potential within himself and the moral

order of which he is a part, inasmuch as he has a special capacity

unknown to other orders of existence.

Whenever by self-subjection to this universal light, the will of the individual ••• has become a will of reason, the man is regenerate: the reason is then the spirit of the regenerated man, whereby the person is capable of a quickening inter-communion with the Divine Spirit. 42

Only in the reciprocal activity with will, does reason attain to Basil

Willey's definition of it as 'the eye of the spirit, the faculty where­

by spiritual reality is spiritually discerned'. 43

Coleridge notes that the operations of reason more closely

40 AR, p. 143. 41 Friend, I, 501. In his account of the 'soul and its Organs of sense' (see above p.68 ), Coleridge equates 'Practical Reason' with 'will'. In so doing he is emphasising the spiritual nature of the will, I think, rather than intending a complete definition. 42 AR, p. 143. 43 Nineteenth Century Studies, p. 37.

77 resemble those of sense than those of understanding in so far as

'there is an Intuition or immediate Beholding, accompanied by a con­ viction of the necessity and universality of the truth so beholden. 144

In this way reason has its evidence in itself, and Coleridge dis­ tinguishes it categorically from 'those flights of lawless specu­ lation145 which are condemned as 'transcendent' because they operate specifically beyond the bounds of conscious intellect. Reason, as applied to the outward events of experience, has a capacity to ab- stract and to generalise; it is continually seeking for laws which supersede the events by which such laws are made evident. It 'affirms truths which no sense could perceive, nor experiment verify, nor ex- perience' con f'irm. I 46 And in formulating absolutes it introduces the concept of certainty into the framework of human reference. In oppo- sition to this, the understanding depends for its operations on mate­ rial from the senses and as such it is 'contained within the sphere of the senses' •47 Coleridge explains that the understanding 'gives rise to maxims and rules which may become more and more general, but can never be raised into universal verities. 148 The importance of this distinction is revealed when applied to the 'Practical Reason' and to its final end in the growth of spiritual awareness. Here, says

Coleridge, no evidence could be wholly independent of the will, the spiritual principle, for when philosophy is employed upon objects of the 'INNER SENSE', it cannot have its direction determined by any out­ ward object. 'The inner sense has its direction determined for the greater part only by an act of freedom', 49 in other words by a free and spontaneous act of the will.

44 AR, p. 155n. 45 BL, I, 164. 46 AR, p. 154n. 47 AR, p. 155n. 48 ibid. 49 BL, I, 172. 78 The supreme contribution of the reason to the total activi­ ty of the mind lies in its role in unifying the intelligible and the spiritual. It is frequently pointed out that 'one of Coleridge's life-long preoccupations was with the antithesis between a living whole or organism on the one hand and a mechanical juxtaposition of parts on the other. 150 The poet's writings reveal a natural ability to discern qualities of relation and interdependence, of sameness within difference. Coleridge points out that the function of the understanding is to juxtapose things within the mind for their exami­ nation, analysis and comparison. When the mind contemplates itself in this way, it places itself in contradistinction to the objects of nature which it has defined through perception. The mind is felt to be essentially vital whereas the world of nature is seen to comprise objects which are rather 'fixed and dead'. 51 This mode of thinking leads to 'abstract knowledge' which, if allowed to dominate and to exist for itself, supports a 'science of delusion' 52 in which the products of the 'mere reflective faculty' partake of 'Death' • 53 With equal veracity and a great deal more satisfaction, Coleridge discerns working within himself the power of reason, 'that intuition of things which arises when we possess ourselves, as one with the whole'. 54

Many men experience a mysterious predisposition to believe' that the productive power, which is in nature as nature, is essentially one ••• with the intelligence, which is in the human mind above nature. 155

50 See Willey, Nineteenth Century Studies, p. 38. Coleridge commented on Dr. Gillman's copy of The Statesman's Manual that imaginative reason and mechanical understanding may be distinguished in that the one gives rise to 'Produce - or Growths', the other to 'Products'. (LS, p. 29n. Also noted in Barfield, p. 230n) 5 l BL, I, 202. 52 Friend, I, 521. 5 3 BL, I, 98. 54 Friend, I, 520. 55 Friend, I, 49 7-498.

79 Such a belief grows out of the primary products of experience by virtue of the unifying force of reason which fuses the known elements of under­ standing with the unknown forces of intuition. The highest achievement of reason is to unite all the various functions of the mind, active and passive, conscious and unconscious, into the process of philosophic thought in which the individual experiences himself as one with the whole living complex of his experience. I.A. Richards points out that:

This process results in the birth of 'Ideas': those truths the knowledge or acknowledgement of which require the whole man, the free will no less than the intellect, and which are not therefore merelr speculative, nor yet practical, but both in one. 6

Coleridge himself declares that reason provides 'the substantiating principle of all true wisdom, the satisfactory solution of all the contradictions of human nature, of the whole riddle of the world'. 57

At this point one is immediately struck by the similarity between this, the most important function of reason, and many of those famous Coleridgean descriptions of imagination. Those truths accessible to us through reason fully developed, are here said to 'require the whole man'; elsewhere it is imagination which 'brings the whole soul of man into activity'. 58 Reason is here described as resolving 'all

the contradictions of human nature'; and yet imagination is the faculty which 'struggles to idealize and unify'59 and which is capable of 'redu-

56 Richards, p. 138. 57 Friend, I, 524. 58 BL, II, 12. 59 BL, I, 202.

80 cing multitude to unity' in creation of imagery. 60 Definitions such as these are obviously confusing and one laments the uncontrolled dis­ cursive style which constantly reveals a slow working out of problems rather than any synthesis of their solutions. Only too often does

Coleridge seem not to know what he thinks until he sees what he has said, and the reader is left to make the effort of weighing and orga­ nizing the dominant emphases. In this case we meet the same blurring of distinctions as occurs in descriptions of the combined activity of reason and will, yet this in itself points to a common difficulty in the clarification of all three faculties. Description is seen to be possible when the mental process under examination is as it were, frozen at a median point in the full scope of its activity, and iso­ lated from all other contemporaneous influences. It falls down when

Coleridge comes, as he nearly always does, to consider the full pos­ sibilities of a faculty. His interests are self-confessedly not only

'What our faculties are', but 'what they are capable of becoming 161 and it is frequently in this latter consideration that logical expo­ sition gives way to the suggestiveness of imagery in his prose. In other words when Coleridge is faced with a process of growth involving the generation of a new order of mental activity from a less complex one, he frequently fails to make the necessary clarification of the points of transition. Nevertheless there emerges from the cumulative effect of his descriptions a real sense of the fluidity and change in the operations of the mind. The faculties which he is at pains to clarify are seen to absorb each other at the point of merger, reaching their most productive forms of activity in the state of transition.

60 BL, II, 16. 6 1 CL, I, 397.

81 The value of the image of organic growth lies in the fact that it absorbs this difficulty, conveying the process of metamorphosis easily without the necessity for reasoned exposition.

It is important that we recognise Coleridge's emphasis on

this form of nodal activity because by it we are made aware of the spiral, rather than linear, pattern of mental development. There has been much recent discussion based on one of Coleridge's marginal

diagrams where he depicts mental powers as 'set above' each other in

relatively straightforward hierarchical order with reason at the top. 62

However, where the emphasis is on process, such a schema can only be a limited aid to understanding. To give it greater prominence than

it merits is to encourage such statements as James Boulger's that,

in Coleridge's philosophy, 'imagination can be finally agreed to have

a high place but not the highest' • 63 The principle for Coleridge is one of containment, upward expansion most closely approximating to what he termed an 'eddy' rather than to the more mechanistic links

in a chain of succession. Two significantly complementary quotations written many years apart, may speak for themselves:

This is one proof of the essential vitality of nature, that ••• she at one and the same time ascends as by a climax, and expands as the concentric circles on the lake .•• 64

Herein consists the essential difference •.• of an organ from a machine; that not only the characteristic shape is evolved from the invisible central power, but the material mass itself is acquired by assimilation

62 See James D. Boulger, "Coleridge on Imagination Revisited," The ~lords- worth Circle, 4(1973), 13-24, J.R. de J. Jackson,Method and Imagination in Coleridge's Criticism (London, 1969), pp. 113-121 and Barfield, pp. 92-114. 6 3 Boulger, p. 14. 64 TL, pp. 572-573.

82 ••• As the unseeen agency weaves its magic eddies, the foliage becomes indifferently the bone and its marrow, the pulpy brain, or the solid ivory. That what you see is blood, is flesh, is itself the work, ••• the translucence, of the invisible Energy, which soon surrenders or abandons them to inferior powers •.• which repeat a similar metamorphosis according to their kind. 65

Philip Ritterbush in a recent paper about the study of form in the life sciences,has demonstrated that the logarithmic spiral is no unapt emblem of 'the basic principle of organization in living nature'. 66

It is clear from several of Coleridge's uses of the term 'eddy', espe-

cially those related specifically to the context of poetry to which I shall refer later, 67 that by it he intended to convey that special kind of cyclical process which is the pattern of progressive metamorphosis.

In trying to analyse the exact motions of his own imagination, for instance, he describes 'the Soul in its round & round flight forming narrower circles, till at every Gyre its wings beat against the personal

Self. 166 This activity is notably opposite to the expanding circles on the lake because it is the result of a 'decrease of Hope and Joy'.

Nevertheless Coleridge learns from it the all-subsuming nature of the mind in its eddy:

Shall I try to image it to myself, as like some fairer Blossom-life in the centre of the Flower-polypus, a life within a Life, & constituting a part of the Life that in­ cludes it? A consciousness within a consciousness, yet mutually penetrated, each possessing both itself & the other - distinct tho' indivisible. 69

65 AR, p. 267. 66 "Organic Form: Aesthetics and Objectivity in the Study of Form in the Life Sciences," in Organic Form, ed.G.S. Rousseau (London,1972),pp.47-50. 67 See below, Chapter VI, pp.154-155. 68 Notebooks, II, 2999. There is some confusion implicit here in that Coleridge also occasionally used the term 'eddy' in describing exactly this circular and non-productive activity of the depressed imagination where upward progression is stunted, as in the quotation above, p. 49. 69 ibid.

83 In terms of mental organization, then, Coleridge has a special in­

terest in nodal activity because, imaged as metamorphosis, it helps to solve the problem of co-presence and co-instantaneity. In one instance, for example, he explains that:

REASON, ·without being either the SENSE, the UNDERSTANDING or the IMAGINATION, contains all three within itself, even as the mind contains its thoughts, and is present in and through them a11. 70

Thus the 'self-circling energies' of reason, though of greatest value for Coleridge because of their direct emanation from the source of divine energy Himself, are themselves absorbed by the mind in its highest act of pure imagination.

It is apparent from his prose that as Coleridge got older, he spent more time analysing the spiritual nature of mental activity and less time concerned with imagination as directed towards art, as he had been in the Biographia. In the earlier work he shows himself most

challenged by definition of this 'mediating' power, and again he runs

up against the stumbling block of process. He wishes to convey a hierarchical development through different types of imaginative activi­

ty and he can only do so by isolating certain static points on a value

scale. So evolves the famous distinction between primary and secondary

imagination and in short definitions, Coleridge does make specific

statements about the nature of the relationship between them. Secondary

imagination is 'identical with the primary in the kind of its agency,

and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation' (I, 202).

70 LS, pp. 69-70.

84 Both faculties are characterised by movement and activity. It is only in the process of change that they come into being; in effect they are the gradual metamorphoses taking place in the generation of thought, being recognised primarily by the results of their activity in the same way as is the will. As Coleridge puts it, 'The rules of IMAGINA­

TION are themselves the very powers of growth and production.' (II, 65)

In this respect primary and secondary functions of the imagination are not to be distinguished. From the products of their respective activi­ ties they may initially be differentiated.

In attempting to define imagination, Coleridge tries several methods of approach. He spends much time and energy first of all in considering idealism and the philosophical problems of the mind's ap­ prehension of the universe. The definition of primary imagination which finally emerges, almost as a by-product, in Chapter XIII depends to a large extent on what has earlier been decided about the psychology of perception. The poet's complex struggles with the nature of subject and object in an act of sense perception frequently lead the reader to bafflement or boredom, but odd flashes of insight indicate some prog­ ression towards a synthesis of ideas. In particular, Coleridge steadily emphasises that there are three, rather than two, elements in any act of sense perception. He posits an object, definably 'dead, fixed, in­

capable in itself of any action, and necessarily finite' (I, 185), and a subject which is absolute, infinite, and 'for which all, itself in­

cluded, may become an object' (I, 184). These are hypothetical be­

cause each is only experienced in the act of its being absorbed in the other. It is the point of union, the new entity, which is of primary

85 importance because it alone exists to consciousness. Here it is that

Coleridge identifies the action of the will in the metamozphosis from

unconscious to conscious, but it is an activity in which choice plays no part. Creativity at the level of perception takes place as a

result of that act of freedom which constitutes the individual will but without any fonn of conscious direction. Through his view of the

interdependence of the creative will and reason, Coleridge sees the

agency o f Go d even in. the simp. 1 e act o f percep t'ion. 71 The mind con- scious of itself in perception is synonymous with the intelligent will or 'spirit', and later the definition of the process of perception is

couched in significantly religious tenns.

The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime agent of all human Perception, and as a repe­ tition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. (I, 202)

The creativity of the mind in the act of perception is fre­ quently depicted by Coleridge as absorbing the organ of sense itself,

giving rise to a whole vocabulary of 'inner senses' 72 and to a con-

fusing mystique surrounding the properties of the physical organs.

O! what a life is the eye! what a strange and inscrutable essence! Him that is utterly blind, nor glimpses the fire that warms him; ••• Even for him it exists, it moves and stirs in its prison; Lives with a separate life, and 'Is it a Spirit?' he murmurs: 'Sure it has thoughts of its own, and to see is only a language.' 73

71 I take this view of Coleridge's 'primary imagination' because of its relationship to the foregoing argument in the Biographia (see below pp. 91-92) and in opposition to the interesting, though not completely convincing, thesis put forward by Jackson that primary imagination is in fact synonymous with Coleridge's 'reason'; see op.cit., pp.109-121. 7 2 See Judson S. Lyon, "Roman tic Psychology and the Inner Senses," PMLA, 71, 216-260.

7 3 PW, I I 30 5 •

86 The tendency to etherealize shows Coleridge's uncontrolled veneration of unconscious mental activity and it is often evident in his discus­ sions of the senses and of imagination. Fancy, on the other hand, which is characterised by its operation of the conscious will, 'that empirical phenomenon •.• which we express by the word CHOICE' , 7 ~ is summarily described. It juxtaposes products of the creative percep­ tion with other ready-made 'counters' culled from memory and the pro­ cesses of association, to produce a new arrangement of ideas rather than a synthesis, or new idea. It lacks interest and, significantly, value for Coleridge because it exists solely in the realms of 'fixities and definities'.

As has often been noted, secondary imagination is clearly a higher order of imagination for Coleridge. And, once again, prior to the seven-line definition in Chapter XIII have gone many pages of philo­ sophizing about imaginative activity. From these, however, it is pos­ sible to glean something of what Coleridge means by his claim that the secondary imagination differs from the primary only in degree. In the discussion of association at the opening of Chapter V of the Biographia,

Coleridge mentions a historical development in psychology from the simple distinction between the presence and absence of the will in mental activity, to the more complex recognition of active and passive functions of the mind. He suggests that the impetus for this development lay in the realization that at times 'our nature seemed to act by a mechanism of its own, without any conscious effort of the will, or even against it' (I,66). The subsequent classification of mental processes there­ fore goes on to specify the passive and the voluntary, and also to in-

7 ~ BL, I, 202.

87 elude '· the spontaneous, which holds a middle place between both'.

Again Coleridge reveals the focal point of his interest. He blurs the distinctions between passive and unconscious, active and volun­ tary (or conscious) , 75 in order to centre upon that point of transi­ tion partaking of both active and passive, in which the unconscious takes on the forms of consciousness. He is working towards a higher order of imagination than that evident in the creativity of percep­ tion, though one dependent upon the same union of opposing forces.

In this higher activity, voluntary control is effected by the con­ scious will so that the whole procedure demands a much more complex mental organization than primary imagination.

Some elucidation of this complexity follows when Coleridge takes up the subject again, this time falling back on analogy (I, 85).

He suggests that we should consider what it is that we do when we leap and identifies a purely voluntary act in the initial resistance of gravity, which is followed by a yielding to gravity that is only in part voluntary. This analogy is only partially successful in that it conveys one fluid linear process rather than two opposing movements linked by a point of transition which absorbs both forces while being itself neither. So Coleridge starts again and this time gets much closer to clarifying his thoughts. With unforced expertise he paints

the picture of a small water-insect swimming against the stream and suddenly the ease of the writing, characteristic of Coleridge in the world of nature, promises the reader genuine insight. The little

75 James Baker takes these distinctions at face value and makes, to my mind, too rigid a correlation between conscious and active, un­ conscious and passive mental processes: op.cit., p. 191.

88 creature's 'alternative pulses of active and passive motion' are identified, but progress is made specifically from a 'fulcrwn', that

'intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive' (I,

86). As Coleridge points out, this is no unapt emblem for his con­ ception of the mind's experience in thinking, and he specifically parallels the imagination with the 'intermediate faculty', locating the centre of new growth at the point of union of active and passive, conscious and unconscious.

The characteristic tripartite structure of natural produc- tion is a common feature of both primary and secondary imagination and thus Coleridge establishes a common basis for both perception and thought processes. Where these two faculties differ in themselves, lies with the other mysteries of the growth of individuality, in the complex organization of mental awareness. While primary imagination is unconscious, being only recognizable by the results of its activity, secondary imagination enlarges the scope of thought generation by focussing upon itself in process. The growth of self-consciousness provides structure for Coleridge's hierarchy of various mental experi­ ences and clearly suggests varying degrees of imaginative capacity.

One man's consciousness extends only to the pleasant or unpleasant sensations caused in him by external impressions; another enlarges his inner sense to a consciousness of forms and quantity; a third in addition to the image is conscious of the conception or notion of the thing; a fourth attains to a notion of his notions - he reflects on his own reflections. (I, 172)

The mind reflecting on itself is a centre of growth even as it is the means of awareness of growth. Thus Coleridge declares that the test for the philosopher is that 'heaven-descended KNOW THYSELF', again

89 using the assumption that total self-consciousness, the complete union of imagination, reason and will, is pure Mind, or God.

Secondary imagination in Coleridge's definition 'coexists with the conscious will' (I, 202), indicating not only its development from primary imagination in terms of self-awareness, but also in terms of voluntary control. The analogy with the water-beetle makes clear the imagination's reliance upon a source of energy in the unconscious which acts at one pole in the structure of opposition. Coleridge goes on to emphasise that in the highest operations of the imagination, as in the production of poetry, a 'superior voluntary controul' is also required, in conjuction with a superior degree of the mediating faculty

(I, 86). There seems at first to be some confusion in Coleridge's con­ ception of the imaginative faculty in this respect. For example, des­ pite considerable stress on the importance of the unconscious, Coleridge insists that in the production of poetry the imagination is 'first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their ir­ remissive, though gentle and unnoticed controul' (II, 12). This remark has contributed to the variety of interpretations which I mentioned briefly in the previous chapter, concen1ing Coleridge's neglect of either the conscious or the unconscious and their roles in psychologi­

cal creativity. 76 In opposition to Abrams and Prickett who find that

Coleridge does not give sufficient consideration to the function of

consciousness, Humphrey House exposes the alternative view and sug-

gests that if one concurs with Lowes in equating the 'streaminess' of

76 Clarence D. Thorpe has fully answered those 'anti-Romantic' critics who deny the role of conscious intellect in Coleridge's imagination and concludes that, 'on the contrary, Coleridge's view is comprehen­ sive and balanced'; see "Coleridge as Aesthetician and Critic," Journal of the History of Ideas, 5 (1944), 387-414.

90 association with dream, which imagination 'curbs and rudders', then imagination must become the 'ally of full waking consciousness and selective acts of the will' • 77 From this view the unconscious shaping process of the will, integral to Coleridge's fully active imagination, is totally disregarded. Then Norman Fruman follows the path trodden earlier by Lowes, apparently without recognising the debate. Empha­ sising Coleridge's mention of the conscious will in secondary imagina­ tion, he assumes that 'any creative role assigned to the unconscious would be left to the "primary imagination"' and even suggests that the point has never been pressed. 78 In fact, Coleridge cannot be faulted for lack of insight, rather for failing to synthesise his ideas and to clarify his use of terms. The will is used indiscriminately to refer to both voluntary and involuntary activity; thus it may have an initiating function in putting in action the secondary imagination and an unconsciously selective one in sustaining its 'gentle and unnoticed control'.

Primary and secondary imaginations, then, are creative through the same process of synthesis of opposing forces. Coleridge tends naturally to compare their activities hierarchically, showing them to be two points on the same scale. By implication he also goes further than this to develop their relationship into a new synthesis, which becomes his total concept of imagination. If one approaches the definitions of primary and secondary imaginations from the opening of

Chapter XIII of the Biographia, a train of thought begins to emerge with the discussion of the two contrary forces mentioned earlier,

77 House, p. 144. 78 op.cit., p. 203. A similar comment is also made on p. 137.

91 'the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity' (I, 196). The element of self-awareness is the distinguishing feature, and it is in this that the two forces 'counteract each other by their essential nature'

(I, 197). Coleridge is then at pains to come to terms with the inter­ penetration of these forces and with the results of their fusion, as distinct from the results of their singular activities. And here we meet the old problem as Coleridge is faced with describing the pro­ cess of new growth from the 'inter-penetration of the counteracting powers, partaking of both' (I, 198). This time he evades the issue with the term, 'tertium aliquid', and then saves himself further defi­ nition by producing a fortuitous 'letter from a friend' suggesting, among other things, that he get to the point. When he does return to the subject, the continued train of thought is conveyed by the opening sentence: 'The Imagination, then, I consider as either primary or secondary' (I, 202). The suggestion is that in the highest genesis of human thought, primary and secondary imaginations, experienced as opposing forces, are fused at the point of metamorphosis from uncon­ scious to conscious, at that same point at which the will reaches its fullest development,informing the mind with the light of reason.

Coleridge's 'imagination' is here contained. Mental growth is demon­ strated as the ascension by climax effected by the reconciliation of opposites and by the simultaneous reduction of multeity to unity. To that extent, and especially when viewed in conjunction with the image of the water-beetle, it exemplifies the consistent pattern underlying

Coleridge's philosophy of creative growth. Gordon McKenzie's early study of Coleridge's organic unity points out that the poet used the unity of organic idealism and that of the triad system interchangeably and that their co-presence suggests a conflict of principles in his

92 thought. 79 The specific nature of Coleridge's organic psychology as I have described it, however, would suggest that he saw the two theories as complementary and co-operating effectively in the same system of growth. Imagination is described as the 'synthetic and magical power' that 'diffuses a tone and a spirit of unity, that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into each'. As the principle of growth it brings 'the whole soul of man into activity' (II, 12) in an eddy of activity which is the highest and most productive process in the growth of the mind.

Coleridge's psychological theory is interesting and penet­ rative. His conception of the mind as a living thing, a growing orga­ nism which follows its own inherent laws of behaviour, offered him a suitable structure on which to develop concepts of value with respect to both psychological and artistic creativity. The metaphors by which he formulated his theories are rarely aided by reasoned exposition and are thus frequently inadequate to the philosophic work they have to do, yet they increasingly convey to the reader the poet's understanding of the importance of merger and fluid development. The hierarchy of mental processes which Coleridge envisaged could only be expressed in the imagery taken from natural history but it nevertheless reveals a consis­ tent psychological vision and this vision contributed significantly to his best work in art and poetry.

79 op.cit., p. 105.

93 CHAPTER V THE MIND AND ART Coleridge's world-view was characterised by a belief in the possibility of self-development inherent in the nature of living things.

In biology and psychology this belief influenced his approach radically and as a consequence, in attempting to define the principles on which to support a philosophy of aesthetics, he begins by exploring the es­ sential nature of the creative process, rather than by examining the artefact itself in its detachment. The cursory mention in the Theory of Life of those 'instincts of art' which are productive of 'works completely detached and inorganic' , 1 is one of the rare instances when

Coleridge focusses upon the product of the creative experience in its separation from the living process through which it evolves. In this context the descriptive term 'inorganic' is used to emphasise that aspect of the artefact which is complete and permanent, outside the effects of movement and change, and it is uncharacteristic of Coleridge

to continue speculating from this viewpoint. For him the centre of

interest remains consistently in psychological activity and when ana­

lysing the complex concept of value with respect to art, his starting place is a consideration of the skills required by the artist in the

formulation of the work. By this method he derives an aesthetic which

embraces a process of mental growth culminating in a product which is

eventually detached from its context in psychological activity in order

to achieve its autonomy. For Coleridge, however, the artefact itself

remains testimony to the unique vitality of the creating mind, an effect

which is achieved by its qualities of symbolism. The work of art is

forged out of the symbolic forms generated by the mind and it is the

gift of the creative man to activate the full range of his mental powers

l TL, p. 596.

94 in an act of imagination and simultaneously to recognise and clarify the results of his creative thinking. In the living process, of course, mental experiences are not bounded and contained; it requires the skill of the artist to postulate an arrest in the unceasing process of psycho­ logical generation in order to isolate the moment of perceived thought and apply his judgment to it. In Coleridge's definition, the 'symbol' is a result of this most fruitful kind of artistic creativity because it is the product of the peculiar growth of the mind that creates it, while it takes its form by subordinating the specific surge for identity out of which it evolves, to its own artistic context.

In the mind's growth to artistic productivity, Coleridge's basic 'essence to existence' formula of psychological development re­ mains applicable, though it gives rise to a characteristic amount of con­ fusion. It is not in the concept of the symbol itself that the confusion lies; in fact much of the strength of Coleridge's theory of aesthetics, incomplete as it is, lies in the integrity of his formulation of the symbol and its value in art. Rather it is the varied descriptions of the psychological phenomena giving rise to the symbol which cause dif­

ficulty. A hierarchy is evident, nevertheless, with the symbol as emer­

gent 'existence' having great value for Coleridge. The preceding contri­ butory elements such as 'thought' and 'idea' are in Coleridge's random

usage generally unclear. The concept of idea seems to have been parti­

cularly important but Coleridge's lack of precision makes it difficult

to know with exactly what significance it is charged. Sometimes he uses

the term following Hume and the Platonists, and sometimes as in common

usage to refer to a 'notion' or an amorphous though recognisable stage

in the process of self-awareness. It seems probable, however, that

Coleridge's basic idea in its aesthetic application is intended to carry

with it the suggestion of all the fluidity of process characteristic of

95 a mind in its imaginative activity. In an appendix to The Statesman's

Manual he defines idea fonnally as 'an educt of the Imagination actu­ ated by the pure Reason, to which there neither is or can be an ade­ quate correspondent in the world of the senses - this and this alone

= AN IDEA'. 2

I have remarked that Coleridge referred several times to his own experience of 'thought' as 'motion' and his concept of idea is also unmistakeably kinetic. 3 In terms of organic growth, idea is sometimes likened to the seed which 'carries knowledge within itself, and is pros­ pective'4 but yet it is also prior to growth as the energy of essence­ tuming-to-existence.

This instinct [to seek for elementary laws] is itself but the form, in which the idea, the mental correlative of the law, first announces its incipient gennination ••• 5

In this way the idea is the precursor of the symbol. It is known through the activity which generates its birth and once having undergone the transformation of organization into perfect form, it ceases to be idea, whose nature as essence is chaotic and indefinable. Wi.th specific re- gard to the function of symbols, Coleridge says:

The idea which puts the fonn together cannot itself be the form. It is above form, and is its essence, the universal in the individual, or the individuality itself ••• 6

2 LS, pp. 113-114. 3 In a recent essay Dorothy Emmet discusses the 'idea' as the 'dynamic power' of the mind; see "Coleridge on Powers in Mind and Nature," in Coleridge's Variety, ed. John B. Beer (London, 1974), pp. 169-173. 4 IS, p. 166. 5 IS, p. 248. Owen Barfield has examined in detail the relationship be­ tween idea and law implicit in this quotation; see Barfield, pp. 115- 130. 6 Miscellanies, pp. 48-49.

96 This same essential power of the idea is revealed when Coleridge turns to metaphor and spontaneously likens 'the pure untroubled brightness of an IDEA, that most glorious birth of the God-like within us' to light itself, 'its material symbol' . 7 The reader immediately recalls

Coleridge's 'light of pure Reason' so that the distinction between the mind's activity and its productivity becomes somewhat confused. It is not so much that the light of reason becomes the idea as that this light

constitutes the idea itself, being reflected from 'a thousand surfaces' yet always 'itself above form and still remaining in its own simplicity and identity!' 8 Coleridge's thinking becomes clearer when we come to

consider the symbol. He describes its function as that of a crystal by which light is both reflected and refracted so that the light contributes

to the form of the crystal without itself being changed. A distinction is now evident in that idea prefigures symbol, the one being kinetic, the other static.

Prior to the artist's isolation of the symbol, there must be

that activity by which idea is recognised. An idea takes form in the consciousness just as light is understood to have its own form in the world of nature. For Coleridge these primary forms constitute the ini­

tial insignia of self-awareness, and they are born of fruitful inter­

course with nature. In the Biographia he places the importance of man's

love of natural forms in its constituting a 'step in intellect, though

a low one' (II, 168), and elsewhere suggests that as 'living and life- producing ideas' emerge in the conscious mind, this acts as the focus

and mirror of the germinal causes in nature. 9 Here again we discern

7 LS, p. 50.

8 ibid. 9 Miscellanies, p. 48.

97 the two-fold operations of reflection and refraction by which Coleridge structures the evolution of self-consciousness. In its natural ten- dency to achieve form, the idea must be 'educed by the mind out of its own essence' while simultaneously 'reflected from material masses trans­ formed as it were into mirrors, the excellence of which is to reveal ••. their own original forms and natures' • 10 And the initial structure of thought being finally achieved, Coleridge, in an illuminating manuscript note, emphasises its debt to the phenomenal world. He describes the natural well at Upper Stowey in which

the images of the weeds which hung down from its sides, appeared as plants growing up, straight and upright, among the water weeds that really grow from the Bottom, ••• So - even then I said - so are the happy man's Thoughts and Things - in the language of the modern Philosophers, Ideas and Impressions. 11

This analogy does not tell the full story, however, for it does not convey the unceasing vitality of ideas evolving by means of natural forms.

Humphrey House points out that phenomenal material is not presented to consciousness as such; it only comes to be recognised as the realization of the idea and the idea may only declare itself in the course of this realization. 12 For Coleridge, the idea is motion, an act rather than an entity; it is the symbol in its full aesthetic significance which is the assimilation of a variety of ideas into the completeness of form. Conse­ quently in the creation of symbols the interpenetration of man and nature

is especially crucial.

10 Friend, I, 505. See also Miscellanies, p. 252. 11 IS, p. 37. 12 ~, p. 155.

98 The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and discourses to us b1 symbols - the Natur-geist or spirit of nature ••• 3

Thus the symbol is created out of that vitality of nature which con­ stitutes idea in the human mind. Coleridge summarises this in his famous declaration that 'an IDEA, in the highest sense of the word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol' • 14

Two particularly interesting sources of Coleridge's comments on the role of the symbol in its literary context are his essay 'On

Poesy or Art' and the first of his Lay Sermons. These essays were written within two years of each other and taken with the Biographia

Literaria, they point to a reasonably consistent current of thought on aesthetics which can be seen in Coleridge's work from 1810 to 1820.

The actual creation of the symbol by the assimilation of material phenomena into the mental growth process, is considerably more complex than the germination of the idea. The symbol is itself a phenomenon of 'existence' which must yet retain all the essential vitality of the living moment which it represents. Coleridge approaches the literary symbol through psychology and his insights are interesting because he never forgets that the final function of the symbol is in mental ex­ perience. In this way he is able to envisage a finite body of litera­

ture with a latent capability for stimulation into infinite variety by

interaction with human minds.

13 Miscellanies, p. 48. 14 BL, p. 185. In a very interesting recent article ("The Living Educts of the Imagination; Coleridge on Religious Language," The Wordsworth Circle, 4 [1973], 99-110) Stephen Prickett has clearly elucidated the relationship between Coleridge's 'idea' and 'symbol' (pp. 104-108).

99 The crucible for the fusing of psychological phenomena into art is the consciousness of the artist. He fulfils his purpose by selecting traditional symbols and creating new symbols from his own mental experience, harnessing the power of life within the achieved form. The true artist, or 'genius', succeeds in this by releasing all the energy of his personality, allowing its emergence to consciousness in symbolic fonns which he must subsequently assimilate into the total design of the art work. Coleridge's famous statement on the operations of genius is worth quoting again:

In every work of art there is a reconcilement of the external with the internal; the consciousness is so impressed on the unconscious as to appear in it ••• He who combines the two is the man of genius; and for that reason he must partake of both. Hence there is in genius itself an unconscious activity; nay, that is the genius in the man of genius. 15

Here the emphasis is fairly on the psychological. Coleridge begins to describe the 'work of art' but is naturally led to consider the processes by which it is created. It is noteworthy that the central function of the comment is to point out the necessity for both conscious and uncon­ scious mental activity in creative thinking. 16 We can see, however, that Coleridge's train of thought incorporates the 'external', the world of phenomena, and the 'internal', the world of thought, and it is within this latter that both conscious and unconscious processes are operating.

The structure of creativity is here reduced to a characteristically tripartite process; the thesis-antithesis activity of unconscious and

15 Miscellanies, p. 47. 16 Herbert Read points to Coleridge's awareness of the 'dialectical process whereby conscious is reconciled with unconscious' (op.cit., p. 34), and the necessity for the collaboration of conscious and unconscious acti­ vities in the creative act is also stressed by James Baker, op.cit., p. 144. Baker gives an exposition of Coleridge's view of the func­ tions of the unconscious (pp. 153-166 and 236-248) and of the symbolic imagination (pp. 201-211) but his study is largely comparative and concerned with derivations.

100 conscious modes is finally manifested in their synthesis, the work of art. The work is composed of absorbed phenomenal forms and it finally leaves its creator to stand in the phenomenal world in its own right.

In the above passage Coleridge places great importance on the contribution of the unconscious mind to the creative experience. The generative life of nature appeared to him to be manifestly without con­ sciousness and to emanate from some deep and mysterious source of life.

Herbert Read suggests that in Coleridge's view the unconscious power of the artist enables him to identify himself with this, the formative power of the universe. 17 The free release of unconscious forces is an almost sacred power; it is 'the genius in the man of genius' mainly be- cause it cannot be ordained by the man himself. For Coleridge and others sympathetic to the numinous power of symbolism, it is the unconscious determination of the art form which is the primary one. 18 It is now an accepted psychological fact that large and highly significant elements of the personality never reach consciousness, whether because of repres- sion by the individual or simply because of the limited nature of expe- rience. Coleridge certainly anticipated modern views in understanding that the greater the variety of mental experiences available to the artist, the greater the potential value of his final organized work.

One of the things that characterises genius is the ability to release otherwise unreachable acts of mind. Such an opinion is not in any way exclusive to Coleridge or to his sources; Raphael is supposed to have commented to Leonardo da Vinci; 'I have noticed that when one paints one should think of nothing: everything then comes better! 19

1 7 op. ci t . , p. 1 7 • 18 See, for example, Erich Neumann, Art and the Creative Unconscious (translated by Ralph Manheim, London, 1959), pp. 88-89. 19 Quoted by Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (1911; rpt. New York, 1961), p. 64.

101 It might be said that by by-passing the rigid controls of consciousness, the artist adds a dimension to man's common experience, opening up a world which retains a sense of delight and wonder for its participants.

I think this is what Coleridge means when he says in the Biographia that it is the character and privilege of genius to 'carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day ••• had rendered familiar.' (I, 59) In childhood self-consciousness is embryo­ nic and its controlling power is minimal. Similarly it is the artist's ability to respond directly and spontaneously to experience which secures for him a recurrent 'freshness of sensation' (I, 60). Further­ more it is important for him 'so to represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them.' (I, 60)

According to Coleridge such freshness of representation is only to be achieved by 'a union of deep feeling with profound thought' (I, 59), by which he means to imply a fertile combination of the unknown and the known in mental experience.

The importance of unconscious mental activity is also suggested in The Friend where Coleridge makes the distinction between the processes of 'civilization' and of 'cultivation' • 20 The cultivated man seeks to explore his full nature, to understand the instincts which excite ideas as well as the symbols by which these are communicated. On the other hand, the men who determine 'to shape their convictions and deduce their knowledge from without, by exclusive observation of outward and sensible things as the only realities ' , 21 become rapidly 'civilised' but they surrender all communion with the inward and natural man. They are thus

20 Friend, I, 501-502. 2 l Friend, I, 501.

102 restricted to the historical and cultural determination which is the accidental condition of their lives. In recent years following Freud and Jung, it is widely recognised that an effect of the civilising influence is to repress natural tendencies in human behaviour and that these tendencies remain active in the personality by exerting uncon­ scious force upon the individual. For Coleridge it is the role of the artist to moderate the drive to 'civilization' by, as it were, tapping the recessed stores of the unconscious. By reaching beyond the purely civilised man, the artist can encourage the contribution of basic as­ pects of humanity to man's responses to life. The material released. by the unconscious exists prior to selection and relates not only to the unique experience of the individual, but also to man in his universal character. Coleridge certainly prefigures Jung's distinction between the 'personal' and the 'collective' unconscious and he shows particular respect for the latter. On one occasion he expresses this clearly:

Never let it be forgotten, that every human being bears in himself that indelible something which belongs equally to the whole species, as as well as that particular modification of it which individualizes him ••• 22

And in a manuscript note he tries to reach an explanation of how inherited patterns of activity are developed into specific instincts:

I would ••• say, that Instinct is the wisdom of the species, not of the Individual; ••• let any circumstance occur regularly and thro' many generations, ••• then its every-time-felt inconve­ nience would by little and little act thro' the blind sensations on the organic frame of the animals, till at length they were born wise in that respect. And by the same process do they lose their not innate but connate wisdom. 23

2 2 IS, p. 314. 2 3 IS, p. 244.

103 Following Jung's lead, fonns assignable in origin to the collective unconscious are now frequently referred to as archetypal or primordial and I do not think Coleridge would have quarrelled with this. To ascribe archetypal significance to the artist's raw material is not necessarily to devalue any of the various activities by which this ma­ terial is assimilated into the art work. And Coleridge continually stressed the universal quality possessed by all works of true genius, a quality derived primarily from the power of the unconscious.

If the unconscious is seen by Coleridge to be the primal seat of creative energy, he also recognises that this energy can only be of value in its distinct emergence to consciousness. The releases effected by the unconscious are necessarily random and chaotic and they gradually accede to form by the process of organic growth. I have suggested previously that this procedure is complex and not necessarily confined by detenninism. As with the growth of the mind, so it is with the creation of art. The development of the art form in terms of organic growth is laid down in Coleridge's infamous borrowing from A.W. von

Schlegel in 1811, and the load-bearing statements remain highly charged wi. th insig. . ht • 24 One comment is particularly relevant to the unconscious initiation of artistic organization.

No work of true genius dare want its appropriate form; neither indeed is there any danger of this. As it must not, so neither can it, be lawless! For it is even this that constitutes it genius - the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origina. . t"ion. 25

24 I do not propose to raise the issue of Coleridge's plagiarism which, as I have already mentioned, has been excellently examined by Thomas McFarland; see above, Chapter III, p. 41n. Especially relevant in this context are also Gerald Orsini, "Coleridge and Schlegel Reconsidered," CL, 16, 97-118, Rene Wellek, op.cit., pp. 151-166 and, of course, Norman Fruman, op.cit., pp. 207-210. 25 SC, I, 197-198.

104 The very nature of genius lies in its unconscious activity and it is seen to be characterised by two things, its inherent chaotic amalgam of disparate experiences and its potential for the initiation of the growth to organized fonn. And such growth is not lawless because it is inwardly directed by its own nature. The wonder of the whole pro­ cess lies not only in the miraculous unfolding of the personality to take fonn, but also in the mystery which surrounds the initiation of this evolution.

Coleridge places his emphasis on the gift of the artist to relax conscious controls and to promote, without having the ability to originate, the fluid operations of the growth process. When the artist attempts to mould his mental experiences into predetermined patterns, the result to Coleridge is not 'fonn' but 'shape', 'the death or the imprisonment of the thing', 26 and artistic sclerosis.

Fonn is 'as proceeding'; 'shape' is 'superinduced' , 27 and shape is the work of an over-dominant ego. A certain arrogance is naturally demanded of the artist in that he must appreciate his own finely tuned responses to experience and recognise his ability to organize those responses. He must also, in Coleridge's tenns, feel the need to impress his preconceptions on the world without. 28 On the other hand, his art will never be characterised by living and life-giving fonns if he does not understand how to subordinate his egocentricity. The

'sensation of self' is always in an inverse proportion to the number,

26 Miscellanies, p. 52. 27 ibid. 28 BL, I, 20.

105 clearness and vivacity of thoughts and images 29 as the organic growth to form occurs. This is clearly true of Shakespeare. His characters live and breathe in their own right; everywhere they testify to the genius of their creator while he himself is nowhere apparent.

Shakespeare's plays are full of life, developing from first to last under 'rules of [their] own origina• • t'ion; I 30 the I s h aping • I h an d o f th e dramatist is rarely in evidence.

As the artist's overriding self-awareness decreases, to quote

Raphael again, 'everything then comes better' through the fluid release of unconscious forces. While labelling this power of release the mark of genius, Coleridge was also well aware of the latent chaos in uncon­ trolled unconscious flow; he points out that 'unconscious thoughts' are

'oftentimes the more working the more indistinct they are'. 31 Chaos can be fertile only when the mind is fully active and the artist's judgment is refined by the creative process. In the Biographia there emerges an interesting distinction between 'delusion' and 'illusion' which is dependent upon the nature of artistic judgment. Illusion is described in the same terms as that 'poetic faith' which presupposes a

'willing suspension of disbelief' (II, 6). The judgment is present as in a dream, surveying an autonomous process of development without initiating it but with approval. For the artist, as later for the reader, judgment remains alert, 'ready to awaken us at the first motion of our will' (II, 189), so making the state of 'illusion' fruitful through the interchange of freedom and control. 'Delusion', on the

29 See BL, I, 30. 30 SC, I, 198. 31 Miscellanies, p. 39.

106 other hand, is a •negative faith, which simply permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either denial or affir­ mation of their existence by the judgment. 1 (II, 107) The art form is devalued by uncontrolled instinctive drives in the artist. In a fairly recent study of Romantic symbolism, Frank Kennode exposes a latent danger in the symbolist poetic when the artist finds himself

•pressing on to that semantic explosion when "obscurity" rather than concreteness is the first word that occurs to the literate non-spe­ cialist public.' 32 Coleridge's own experience made him only too aware of the foggy land of subjectivism from which, as he saw, the only exit is by way of the will in its conscious function. Interestingly, however, the contribution of the conscious mind to creativity, is seen to be a matter of instinct finally. Coleridge remarks that the poet will know intuitively 'what intennixture of conscious volition is natural' to the act of poetic composition. 33 The philosophy remains consistent; in artistic creation intuition is pre-eminent but it must not be abandoned by judgment.

Artistic judgment works mainly, though not exclusively, in conjuction with conscious volition. Its function is to modify the promptings of instinct with the forms of consciousness. The judgment provides the final measure of clarity and articulateness in the art work, even as it does in the growth of the mind to self-consciousness.

Consequently the judgment of the artist must be well refined:

32 Romantic Image (1957; rpt. London, 1971), p. 130; hereafter referred to as Ke rroc,de • 3 3 BL, II, 64.

107 A system, the first principle of which it is to render the mind intuitive of the spiritual in man (i.e. of that which lies on the other side of our natural consciousness) must needs have a greater obscurity for those, who have never disciplined and strengthened this ulterior conscious­ ness.3~

Judgment brings into play the 'ulterior consciousness' and while its refinement is instinctive, its role is to provide rational organization and to assess the appropriateness of the products of growth. As the art work begins to emerge in its own right, its forms are such that, as

Erich Neumann has argued in Art and the Creative Unconscious, the numi­ nosum is contained and the fruits of inappropriate creative energy are excluded. 35 Thus by the exercise of a fine judgment, both artist and reader may be rescued from an excess of subjectivity. Coleridge makes this point most forcibly with reference to Shakespeare in the lecture entitled 'Shakespeare's Judgment Equal to His Genius'. Here he declares the need to destroy the 'popular notion that he [Shakespeare] was a great dramatist by a sort of instinct' 36 and 'to prove that in all points from the most important to the most minute, the judgement of Shakespeare is commensurate with his genius - nay, that his genius reveals itself in his judgement, as in its most exalted form.' 37 The essay continues

to repeat much of Schlegel's exposition of organic form and here again

it is made clear that to Coleridge there is no incongruity in the inclu­

sion of conscious mental activity and choice in organicism. He had

elsewhere noted that while the pursuits of men of genius are eminently

subjective, the mind is nevertheless 'intensely watchful of its own acts

3~ BL, I, 168. 35 op.cit., p. 92. 36 SC, I, 194. 37 SC, I, 114. Coleridge also makes this point in the Biographia, des- cribing Shakespeare as 'no mere child of nature; no automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration possessed by the spirit, not possessing it ... ' (II, 19)

108 and shapings, thinks, while it feels, in order to understand, and then to generalize that feeling. 138

One of the ways in which the consciousness of the genius is seen to excel is the ability to generalise from mental experiences, in other words in the exercise of the understanding. Coleridge suggests that in order to achieve creativity we must learn to reflect on the thoughts we gain from sensation 39 and that the ability to do this lies initially with our powers of volition. We must direct our attention to the operations of the understanding and so achieve a distinct conscious- ness of the significance of all the emerging forms, whether products of the understanding itself or of the imagination. By 1825 Coleridge had come to see the steady focus of attention as one of the attributes of genius. The attention of the mind on itself is now described as a pre­ lude to the voluntary act by which we then withdraw attention from all other components of our mental impression and concentrate solely on the selected ones for the purposes of generalisation. 40 In his essay 'Of

Thinking and Reflection' Coleridge had earlier noted how it is that by limiting the range and increasing the intensity of our attention, we gradually reduce the power of conscious concentration which originally directed the attention, and unconsciously release a stream of thought. 41

'The attention attenuates, as its sphere contracts,' he wrote.

38 Miscellanies, p. 258n. 39 See Miscellanies, p. 260. 4 0 AR, p. 149. 4 1 Again Coleridge's insight into mental experience is supported by modern op1.n1.on. Anton Ehrenzweig has an interesting and very appropriate dis­ cussion of "The Two Kinds of Attention" in The Hidden Order of Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), pp. 22-31. And in his book Poetry and Mysticism (London, 1970), Colin Wilson suggests there is a fertile 'slowing-down' of consciousness after concentrated attention upon a focal point. Wilson goes further (and more recklessly) than Coleridge, however, to suggest that we should develop this power of attention into a 'mystical instinct that would counter-balance the excessive self-con­ sciousness of our civilization.' (p. 72)

109 The slender thread winding in narrower and narrower circles round its source and centre, ends at length in a chrysalis, a do:rmita:ry within which the spinner undresses himself in his sleep, soon to come forth quite a new creature. 42

The fruitful union of conscious and unconscious allows the emergence of Coleridge's 'new creature'. It is interesting that here the product of creative activity is conceived in terms of the transformation of the creator, and that its birth takes place under its own instigation. So in art the artist's mind is transformed into his work and the activity generated in its creation is the measure of its life. The unfolding of the organism of art results from the gradually intensifying processes of consciousness and the artefact only exists in and for itself when there is no possibility of further modification.

The process of growth in the sphere of art is not applicable solely to the creator-artist; it is relevant equally to the nature of creative response. This point is made by L.C. Knights in his lecture

"Idea and Symbol: Some Hints From Coleridge" •4 3 Knights suggests that the artistic symbol operates in two overlapping contexts, that from which it emerges and that which it enters, the latter being, 'the moving and developing life of the person responding'.44 He points out that the symbol's power to convey meaning demands a deliberate act of 'consent' in submitting to the influences of the art form; he says that the person coming to the poetic symbol must meet it with 'a recognition that is also an affirmation' •45 The conscious mind must first discipline and

42 Miscellanies, p. 260. 43 In L.C. Knights and Basil Cottle, eds.,Metaphor and Symbol (London, 1960), pp. 135-147; hereafter referred to as Knights & Cottle. 44 Knights & Cottle, p. 136. 45 Knights & Cottle, p. 141.

110 direct the attention in order to release the deeper forces of persona­ lity in a total response. In this way, as Knights says, 'our own ex­ perience - at different levels of consciousness - is brought to a focus in the symbolic structure~ 46

It is clear that Coleridge did not neglect the contribution to the creative process of conscious intellective acts of mind. However, he also warned against the sterility of that art which is constructed by the artist rather than allowed to emerge in its own fonn. His

'shape', the curse of the over-self-conscious artist, offers little to the person responding and cannot involve him in any new growth process.

'Shapeliness is intellect without freedom,' said Coleridge in a short discussion 'On Beauty' , 47 and art is characterised by death if it cannot offer complete freedom of response within its own terms. At one point in the Biographia Literaria, he examines Wordsworth's poem "Fidelity", showing that certain lines were written 'because the poet would so write'

(II, 96), with the poet's faculty of conscious choice in dominance. A further section of the same poem seems an infinitely superior reflection of the poet's genius, having been written, conjectures Coleridge, 'because the poet could not so entirely repress the force and grandeur of his mind'

(II, 96). The conscious mind cannot do its work alone, especially in the field of poetry where the medium is language. In a very famous passage

Coleridge outlines the art of poetry:

The best part of human language, properly so called, is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself. It is fanned by a voluntary appropriation of fixed symbols to internal acts, to processes and results of imagination, the greater part of which have no place in the consciousness of uneducated man ••• 148

46 Knights & Cottle, p. 140. 47 Miscellanies, p. 40. 48 BL, II, 39-40.

111 This passage brings together all the major points so far outlined in

Coleridge's philosophy of art. The aesthetic process is initiated as

'internal acts' which emerge into consciousness for their 'voluntary appropriation' to forms and these may be called symbolic because of their relevance to universal aspects of personality. The symbols find their medium by the continuing process of imagination, refining the consciousness and, in the case of poetry, producing 'the best part of human language' •

It can now be seen that Coleridge was basically consistent in his thinking about aesthetic creativity, despite the erratic organi­ zation of his thoughts. He conceives a structure to productive activity based an the tension of forces in polar opposition. Creativity is cha­ racterised by activity, but an activity by which tension is resolved to harmony and stasis. The forces held in tension in the aesthetic process are the unconscious and the controlling ego, each driving forward under the initial creative impulse. In Jung's psychology, success in the

'quest of wholeness' necessitates the 'forging of a link between the conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche'. 49 For Coleridge success is seen in terms of upward expansion from new centres of growth and the symbol is both product and cause of growth because it has a life of its own; it

effectuates its own secret growth, still contracting to fix what expanding it had refined .•• Lo! - how upholding the ceaseless plastic motion of the parts in the profoundest rest of the whole it becomes the visible organismus of the whole silent and elementary life of nature ••• 50

49 See Frieda Fordham, An Introduction to Jung's Psychology (1953; rpt. Harmondsworth, 1972), pp. 76-77. 50 LS, p. 72.

112 Beauty is a natural quality of such a Symbol, as beauty itself is boni of the reconciliation of centripetal and centrifugal forces, the former referring to the 'shapely ••• and in this, to the law, and the reason', and the latter to 'the lively, the free, the spontaneous, and self-

JUStl.' 'f ying ' I • 51 And as an example of beauty, Coleridge cites the per- fection of the curve which is simply 'a modification of the force from without by the force from within' • 52

Erich Neumann in his essay "Creative Man and Transformation", 53 suggests that the artist undergoes a total transformation in his pro­ duction of archetypal symbols and in his relationship with them. L.C.

Knights would agree with this, though in his essay he puts his emphasis on the experience of response to the symbol which the artist has created. 5 ~

From both standpoints, where the symbol involves man in the 'impersonal depths of the personality' , 55 creative transformation is seen to occur, or, in Coleridge's terminology, by interaction with the symbol the mind continues to grow and thus to manifest its life. And, for Coleridge, the energy for propagation by which life is known is a direct emanation from God. The final work of art is to him an expression of the numinous and is invested with religious significance no matter what its subject matter. 56 Neumann also describes the transformative power of art in religious terms. He suggests that while the opposing forces of man's creative drive are in perfect balance, the result is harmony and peace,

51 Miscellanies, p. 40. 52 ibid. 5 3 OI!_. ci t., pp. 149-205. 5~ Kni~hts & Cottle, pp. 136ff. 55 Kni~hts & Cottle, p. 141. 56 This is demonstrated by Boulger's essay "Coleridge on Imagination Revisited," loc. ci t.

113 bespeaking the presence of God. But, 'when there is a dangerous split­ ting off of the conscious world from the unconscious' , 57 this leads to the emergence of evil. The role of Satan here is that of a total controlling consciousness, the antithesis of the primordial living world of transformation. In this guise Satan constitutes 'rigidity' or 'un­ equivocal self-certainty' and his influence in art is to father forms characterised by sclerosis and paralysis. On the other hand, the Devil is also experienced as 'chaos', that is, all that is amorphous, blurred, structureless and averse to form. 'Across the diabolical axis of rigidity and chaos,' says Neumann, 'cuts the transformative axis of life and death. 158 The perfectly harmonized symbol stands at the intersection of these axes, outside all process while yet inextricably involved.

The paradoxical nature of the symbol poses no insuperable problem for Coleridge because of the all-inclusiveness of his concept of imagination. The paradox of matter invested with spirit was all around him in nature, and for him the imagination of man could reproduce in the mind God's work in the world. Man had the added faculties of

'reflexion, freedom, and choice' and his mind was 'the very focus of all the rays of intellect which are scattered throughout the images of nature' • 59 The 'myste:ry of genius in the Fine Arts' lay in the power of the imagination 'to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature•. 60 The resulting symbol belonged to the world of material nature (and so rested at a point on

57 op.cit., p. 163. An excellent secular view of the Transformative role of the symbol is given by Suzanne Langer in "Symbolic Trans­ formation," Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), pp. 26-52.

5 S ibid.

59 Miscellanies, p. 47.

6 O ibid.

114 the life-and-death axis) and yet it was invested with spirit by the impetus of reason in imagination (remaining firmly equidistant from the evils of rigidity and chaos). In the overlapping contexts of literature and religion, Coleridge describes the creation of symbolic forms as a clear and fluid process:

In the Scriptures they are the living educts of the Imagination; of that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the Reason in Images of the Sense, and organizing (as it were) the flux of the Senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the Reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors. 61

The full nature of the symbol is revealed here, but for the moment I would just remark upon the spiritual element in its creation. Reason acting through imagination provides the universality of spiritual energy, and in its part-conscious part-unconscious interpenetration with nature, the imagination provides the material for the metamorphosis of this energy to form. Imagination ensures the capture of the spirit of life within the beauty of form and this is the great gift, the 'genius' of the fine artist.

As is well known,coleridge's main expositions of the mind in the production of aesthetic form are taken from Schelling's essay 'On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature' and from Schlegel's lectures on dramatic art. The core of the aesthetic principle that he restated is that the art work is a 'living body' which 'must embody in order to reveal itself' 62 and it does so according to an inherent principle of

6 1 LS, pp. 28-29. 62 SC, I, 197.

llS organization. 'This,' remarks Coleridge, 'is a necessity of the human mind' and it resembles the procreative drive in nature by which form evolves. When,however, Coleridge came philosophically face to face with the structure of material form, he realized that this itself is always in a state of process. The only way to understand the concept of fonn is to posit an arrest in the complex organization of matter and to grasp with the imagination the 'essence' or universal principle behind the natural manifestation. In The Friend he says:

individuality .•• is only conceivable as with and in the Universal and Infinite ••• The finite form can neither be laid hold of, nor is it any thing of itself real, but merely an apprehension, a framework which the human imagination forms by its own limits •.• 63

This is Coleridge after Plato, and it is doubtful if he ever really lost the courage of this conviction. The perfection of the ideal form, existing prior to the evolution of matter, constitutes the spiritual essence which is latent identity in each living thing. Coleridge feels that the substance of the natural phenomenon is the language by which

God speaks to man of the beauty of fonn. It is the artist's role to master the essence of form in nature, the natura naturans, 64 and to repeat the process in art by imbuing his own created forms with the essence of his soul, made possible by the release of energy from the unconscious. In Coleridge's parallel between the creativity of the mind and that of nature, he envisages a 'body' of thought whose sub­ stance is change and corresponds to matter in nature. Thus 'Thought' remains invested with the 'corporeality' of motion and inner energy for ever vitalizes the evolutionary process. In nature and art, 'such is

63 Friend, I, 520. 64 Miscellanies, p. 46.

116 the life, such the fonn'; 65 in poetry, 'such he is:• so h e wri"t es;1 66 in• all, 'each exterior is the physiognomy of the being within'. 67 I think it becomes clear from this that Coleridge's quotation mf Sir John Davies' poem at the crucial exposition of imagination in the Biographia is some­ what misleading. The poem's emphasis on the sublimation of matter to spirit has led commentators to see this as the major function of the

'poetic Imagination. 168 To Coleridge, however, the abstraction of fonn from matter, though of vital importance, is only half the process. One of the main implications which he draws from the application of organic growth to art is that fonn proceeds from a spiritual directive. The aesthetic imagination certainly 'draws a kind of quintessence from things' 69 but it is her function equally to structure the essential personality of the artist and so to effect the growth of spirit to fonn. Imagination is then finally responsible for the embodiement of fonn in the matter of the art work. Sir John Davies dismisses this latter process in one line, depicting imagination as suddenly 're-clothed in divers names and fates'. 70 But for Coleridge the aesthetic process must be a perfectly balanced growth to beauty; elsewhere he defines it as 'the subjection of matter to spirit so as to be transfonned into a symbol, in and through which the spirit reveals itself' . 71

The artist's grasp of the spiritual component of living fonns confers upon his own work the quality of universality. The great gift

65 SC, I, 198. 6 6 BL, I I, 12 3 . 6 7 SC, I, 19 8. 68 See, for example, Richard Fogle, The Idea of Coleridge's Criticism (Berkeley, 1962), p. 58. 6 9 BL, II, 13. 70 ibid. 71 Miscellanies, p. 26. Coleridge's view of the relationship between the symbol and the reality which it represents has been examined by Mary Rahme, whose main conclusion is that the symbol represents a process of creation, an - 'active progression of "mul tei ty into unity"'; see "Coleridge's Concept of Symbolism," S.E.L., 9(1969),619-632. 117 of the art work is to take us beyond ourselves to an understanding of the conditions of existence, which amounts almost to an imaginative illumination. The work's power to do this lies in its symbolic forms which, at one level, are generic and instructive, 'applicable to all classes of men' , 72 and on the highest level are archetypal and are concerned with the ideal nature of truth. For Coleridge the best symbols present the perfect embodiment of the universal in the parti­ cular and involve us in mental experiences of great significance which can not consciously be sought. Some modern commentators seem to resist suggestions of the numinous in effective symbolism because its source in the chaos of the unconscious subtracts value for them in the aesthetic context. 73 R.L. Brett in particular quarrels with the sig­ nificance attributed to 'primordial images and archetypal patterns', declaring that value lies in the conscious appeal of form. 7 ~ This is obviously true, but over-simple. So much of aesthetic appreciation depends upon unconscious and in many ways uncontrollable acts-of mind that it is only possible finally for us to define value in the context of personality. Consciousness, as Coleridge shows, plays its largest part in the articulation of judgment in an area of aesthetic pleasure where the unconscious has already largely determined the response. In the illuminating passage already quoted (p. 115), Coleridge describes the birth of symbols as emanating from reason and as such their power is to transmit truths above sense and intellect. The chaos of infonna- tion supplied to the mind by the senses is material for assimilation to

7 2 BL, I I, 18 7. 73 Northrop Frye in one instance, ascribes archetypal power to a 'learned association' achieved by 'the larger communicative context of education': Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, New Jersey, 1957), p. 99.

7 ~ Reason and Imagination (London, 1960), pp. 19-20.

118 form through the growth of reason. And this growth is effected by the activity of the will in its transformation of Divine Energy into the unique spirit of the individual. In the aesthetic context Coleridge is describing the power of imagination in its total capacity to effect the emergence of the spirit of the artist into unique personalised form.

The resulting symbols are thus 'harmonious and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors'; they are the embodiment of man in his universal, primordial and spiritual nature, yet the process of their embodiment is the achievement of a highly articulate individual.

Coleridge parallels scriptural symbols with the wheels of the living chariot in Ezekiel's vision. The truths conducted by them constitute that material evidence which supports the 'throne of Divine Humanity'. 75

The symbol then is a vehicle of motion but one which may be isolated and examined in terms of its imaginative union of opposing forces. In art as in life Coleridge frequently described manifestation as dependent on the synthesis of two positive counterpoints which then

'expands, or produces itself'. 76 The symbol is a living moment in the growth of the mind, arrested and removed from its context by the artist.

It constitutes the harmonious tension of centrifugal and centripetal forces, 'the perfect reconciliation, ••• of the FREE LIFE, and of the confining FORM!' 77 Of itself the symbol does not have the qualities of chaos, motion and 'becoming' which pertain to growth, although as part of the growth process it may be absorbed and reassimilated; nor does it constitute perfect order, stasis and 'being' which are the projected

75 LS, p. 29. 76 TL, p. 580. 77 Miscellanies, p. 46.

119 attributes of God alone. The symbol is union, a composite whole of its own organization characterised by tensions held in a state of poise.

In order fully to understand the symbol it is necessary to experience it imaginatively, grasping its resolved paradoxes in a way which defies articulation. Frank Kermode puts the symbolist point of view forcefully in his discussion of the Romantic Image and he states categorically that the symbol 'yields to no analysis' and is 'resistant to explication'. 78

While this at first sight seems extreme, I could not help noticing the contradictions which arose naturally in the discussions of the Colston

Research Society on metaphor and symbol. 79 While the members feel per- fectly in accord with one another, one speaker comments, 'Being is present in a symbol, the fullest possible expression of Being in a profound way.', and another, 'I certainly feel that by the very nature of things the symbol is dynamic.' One feels immediately that it is in the articulation of the experience of the symbol that the inconsistencies occur rather than in the experience itself. Coleridge succinctly says, ' ••• all symbols of necessity involve an apparent contradiction•, 80 and this, one feels, is one of the attractions for him.

In the context of the work of art the role of the symbol is to subsume all contradiction by its principle of unity in multeity.

Coleridge extends the power discerned in life 'which unites a given all

78 Kermode, p. 107. Important supporting statements by poets have been made by Auden: "A symbol is felt to be such before any possible meaning is consciously recognised." (quoted in M. Beebe, ed., Literary Symbolism [San Francisco, 1960), p. 159) and by Yeats: " ••• the soul moves among symbols and unfol-ds in symbols when trance, or madness, or deep medi­ tation has withdrawn it from every impulse but its own." ("The Symbolism of Poetry," Essays and Introductions (London, 1961), p. 162).

79 Knights & Cottle, pp. 114-118. 80 EL, I, 100.

120 into a whole that is presupposed by all its parts' 81 and applies it to art. In the essay 'On Poesy or Art' he identifies the principle of beauty also in 'this unity in multeity' because the mind can only be completely satisfied by the contemplation of the interdependence of parts within a whole, unified in tension by the opposing forces which initiate their creation. 82 And elsewhere he states emphatically:

The sense of beauty subsists in the simultaneous intuitive of the relation of parts, each to each, and of all to a whole: exciting an immediate and absolute complacency, without intervenence, therefore, of any interest, sensual or intellectual. 83

The imagination by which beauty is created is also nominated 'esemplastic' and the symbol, product of the creative process, is the highly organized body effecting the containment of variety. As form the symbol is 'One'; it has its own identity in the uniting of universal and particular and in this another of its many paradoxes is revealed. Coleridge describes each symbolic element of The Bible as 'a living Germ, in which the Present in­ volves the Future, and in the Finite the Infinite exists potentially. ' 8 ~

Being both finite and infinite the symbol is a moment of rest outside time and space while unable to exist without their jurisdiction. Coleridge shows that when the symbol is contemplated under the relations of time and space, it is inextricably a part of all the mysterious activity of life and growth; 'the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form. 185 Within the time/space context the symbol is charged with a sense of immediacy in invoking direct personal response; it is 'existence' and, as Neumann has pointed out, 'the entire

81 TL, p. 573. Dorothy Emmet has outlined the strengths and weaknesses of the organic unity of Coleridge's symbol in her essay "Coleridge on Powers in Mind and Nature," pp. 174-179. 82 Miscellanies, p. 51. 83 Miscellanies, p. 26. It is interesting that Frank Kerroode says alroost exactly the same thing in modern terms; see Kerroode, p. 143. 8 ~ LS, p. 49. 85 SC, I, 198.

121 past flows into it, while all the future flows out of it like a spring: hence it is a point both turning and at rest. 186 On the other hand, the essential core of the symbol stands at an infinite distance from us, demanding our recognition of the world of the absolute. Coleridge him- self argues that in the zeal for creation, 'the artist must first eloign himself from nature in order to return to her with full effect.' 87 He must imitate nature not copy her, and in imitation he is presented with the need to dissolve essence in existence, the infinite in the finite.

In the Biographia Coleridge states emphatically that the best poetry deals with 'modes of inmost being, to which ••• the attributes of time and space are inapplicable and alien, but which yet can not be conveyed save in symbols of time and space' (II, 120).

This problem has been recognised by many artists who subscribe to the symbolist aesthetic, as Frank Kermode shows in The Romantic Image.

Kermode gives a concise and detailed statement of the paradoxes resolved in the work of art as symbol or 'aesthetic monad' (pp. 56-57), though his discussion concentrates largely on the resolutions of flux-and-arrest and finite-and-infinite achieved by Yeats's image of the dancer. Kermode summarises the image as 'concrete manifestation'; 'ideas rush in and out of it but it is not in itself discursive and cannot mean anything except what it is.' (p.148) Coleridge made no real attempt to develop one poetic image to satisfy all the demands of the symbol, though the power of his poetry is the power of symbolism at its best. In his prose however, Coleridge does use the image of the crystal through which light

86 op.cit., p. 203. 87 Miscellanies, p. 47.

122 is passing to convey Kermode's 'concrete manifestation' through which ideas are rushing. Stephen Prickett points out that Coleridge makes a revealing distinction between the reflection of light as in a mirror and its transmission as through a crystal; the energy of the symbol emanates from the depth of the mind and satisfies all levels of mental ac t 1.v1... t y. 88 With respect to the symbol as form, that of the crystal is applicable in that it is only made apparent by the passage of light.

As Prickett and other commentators have agreed, the image of the crystal makes clear some of Coleridge's discursive statements, in particular his definition of a symbol in The Statesman's Manual as 'characterised by a translucence of the Special in the Individual. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal.' 89 We see immediately the significance of this comment if we bear in mind

Coleridge's 'light of pure Reason' and envisage its transmission by the crystal/symbol, which then naturally 'partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible 190 and becomes, as quoted earlier, 'consubstan- tial' with the truth of which it is the conductor. Its form made mani- fest by the energy of reason as is the crystal's by light, the symbol is depicted as a meaningful, autonomous body bearing all its evidence in itself, and, like reason, 'the source and substance of truths above sense'.

Just as Coleridge places less value upon the understanding than upon the reason because of reason's rise from the numinous, so he also separates in value symbol from allegory. In the same context allegory is described in deadly terms, 'a translation of abstract

88 Prickett, pp. 187-189. 89 LS, p. 30. g O ibid.

123 notions into a picture-language'. As always celebration is made of the quality of life. Symbol 'abides itself as a living part in that unity, of which it is the representative' and so is spoken of with respect and delight; allegory deals with forms which are 'but empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associates with apparitions of matter'.""T.here is no germ within for development so allegory can only be associated with death. Growth is life in art as in nature, and without it there can be no value.

That Coleridge spontaneously pictures the unified work of art in terms of its having grown to fruition is evident time and again in the little parallels he draws to emphasise his points. 91 In one well developed example he locates his own interest in the field of poetry fairly in the mystery of growth:

••• it is my object to investigate the seminal principle ••• My friend [Wordsworth] has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift themselves above ground, and are visible to the naked eye of our conunon consciousness. 92

And as Coleridge says elsewhere, 'the root is never detached from the ground', 93 so its tip cannot be accessible to distinct consciousness.

Nevertheless he seems naturally drawn to illuminate the workings of art with what it is possible to learn from nature. The symbolic units of the art work, each a unity of the many in one, are themselves integrated into the unified artefact and are assimilated organically as parts to a whole. These units create their own echoes and recall each other within the work, welding the artistic unity achieved on the surface level by

91 See, for example, the comparison of 'words and images' with those 'pro­ ducts of the vegetable world', 'gorgeous blossoms' and 'rich fruit' (BL, I, 56). 92 BL, I, 64. 9 3 LS, p. 32.

124 the structure. In Coleridge's words, 'each has a life of its own, and yet all are one life. 19 ~ The particular form of each symbol opens up a series of reverberations which dilate the reader's ex­ perience of the whole work and effect of pattern of minor climaxes similar to 'the path of sound through the air'. 95 These climaxes serve to propel the reader forward in total participation; 'at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward. 196 This motion is clearly that of growth; it is identical with the activity of the imagination depicted earlier in the analogy of the progress of the water-beetle. The symbolic forms of art, participating in the growth of the individual mind, release imaginative energy as at a fulcrum.

They function as nodes, opening up new worlds of significance within the art work and are assimilated with it into the developing life of the reader. Thus, even when Coleridge makes the leap from poet to poem in order to describe the way symbolic overtones accumulate morphogenetically in their context, his bias is still away from analysis of the work of art as an autonomous unit. In the projected Treatise on

Method, he argued that poetry owes 'its whole charm, and all its beauty, and all its power, to the Philosophical Principles of Method. 197 In other words, poetry depends upon principles of morphological progression; it exemplifies the growth of the mind as structure and meaning are fused in the symbolism.

The unity of a work of art in the symbolist mode is then ex-

9~ LS, p. 31. 95 BL, II, 11. 9 6 ibid. 97 TM, pp. 35-36. Coleridge's 'Method' in the fine arts is discussed in detail by Jackson, op.cit., pp. 101-109.

125 perienced largely as an undercurrent of significance sweeping along beneath a structural surface of sense. Frank Kermode points out that when this theory is over-exaggerated and made to support an almost magical subjectivism, it then provokes a war between image and dis­ course.98 The ethos represented in Macleish's dictum 'A poem should not mean/But be199 is obviously worthless where 'being' conveys no

'meaning'. To Coleridge, who had himself little place for discourse within the confines of poetry, the structural level of poetic articu­ lation remains a vital element for artistic assimilation. But in

Coleridge's own poetry especially, the value of a poem lies not simply in what is 'said'; rather it lies in what is conveyed in the reader's total experience of the poem. In the final analysis the best poetry is concerned with the embodiment and transmission of truth, but it is in the combination of a fine articulation with the capacity for uni­ versality and pennanence, that the poem has most to offer. In a telling footnote to the Biographia Literaria Coleridge comments that 'in

Geometry it is the universal truth, which is uppermost in the conscious­ ness; in poetry the individual form in which the truth is clothed.'

(II, 33n) This remark throws some light on one of the more famous of

Coleridge's statements, that a poem proposes 'for its immediate object pleasure not truth' • 10 ° Coleridge's italics refer the reader to his previous proposition that truth 'ought to be the ultimate end' (II, 9), but clearly pleasure is the initial experience of the beauty of form.

This pleasure is notably to be derived from that unity which is the full significance of the symbolic unit, as Coleridge clearly expounds in the essay On Poesy or Art:

98 Kermode, pp. 165-177. 99 'Ars Poetica', The Oxford Book of American Verse, ed. F.O. Matthiessen (1950; rpt. New York, 1968), p. 894. 1 0 0 BL, II, 10.

126 In order to derive pleasure from the occupation of the mind, the principle of unity must always be present, so that in the midst of multeity the centripetal force be never suspended, nor the sense be fatiiued by the predominance of the centrifugal force. 1 1

As we have seen, this unity in multeity is also Coleridge's principle of beauty, so the work of art as symbol is the perfect balance of opposing impulses creating its own unity out of beauty and truth.

Poetry at its best offers both these gifts, delight in the contempla­ tion of the beautiful perfected in the growth of parts to a unified whole, and a glimpse of an eternal truth of the human mind captured for a moment in personalised form.

101 Miscellanies, p. 51.

127 CHAPTER VI THE POETRY OF GROWTH I have discussed at length Coleridge's visualisation of the creative process with its requirement of balanced and harmonised mental activities. In this formulation the best poetry is considered to be the product of continually unfolding acts of mind - sensation, association, understanding, reason, imagination - each relying fundamentally on free integration of conscious and unconscious creative activity. I now propose to use Coleridge's own poetry in order to demonstrate his conception of the organic nature of art. I do not intend to enter the debate argued by Humphrey House and Robert Penn

Warren as to whether or not Coleridge had consciously articulated certain basic aesthetic principles by 1797-8. 1 I would simply say that as

Coleridge refined his sensibilities as a poet, he grew to acknowledge fundamental values in the aesthetic experience and that these were the values later embodied in his depiction of the living mind. My aim here is to show how Coleridge's early interest in fluid mental process was conducive to a certain kind, and equally, to a certain high quality, of poetry. I must, however, disagree on one point with Htnnphrey House, who says that Coleridge's respect for unconscious modes of thought was the result of his illness and despondency in 1803. He comments:

By living through a hell of isolation .•• [Coleridge] came to discover what part the unconscious may play in art and life. 2

The contribution of the unconscious to the creative process is, as I hope to show, the subject of some of Coleridge's best poetry and whether

1 House cautiously reminds us that 'we cannot be sure how much [Coleridge's] critical opinion may be carried back to 1797-8 and brought to bear on his greatest poetry' (House, p. 92) and concludes that Coleridge himself never fully brought his critical theory and poetic practice into relation (pp. 92-93). In reply Warren presents evidence suggesting Coleridge's early identification of the creative imagination and suggests that the poetry is a manifestation of the development of critical theory (Warren, pp. 273-275). 2 House, p. 44. 128 or not he brought his interests to full conscious realization in poetic composition, his increasing respect for the mysterious nature of the unconscious played a significant part in his development as a poet in the years from 1795 to 1799.

A growing awareness of the relationship between primary unconscious forces and the organization of poetry as an art form, can be supported by Coleridge's collection of Poems on Various Subjects, published in 1796. Much of the poetry in this volume is poor and there is every indication that it is the conscious organization of poetic techniques which roars its effectiveness exactly as Coleridge was later to describe. His poetry of the following years, however,

clearly exemplifies his increasing skill as a poet of mental processes and suggests a growing sensitivity to the relations between psychology and poetry. Simultaneously the poetry itself increases in beauty and power as Coleridge gains control of his material and finds a solution

to the problem of the autonomy of the work of art. Two of these poems,

'Frost at Midnight' and The Ancient Mariner, are not only amongst

Coleridge's finest, but richly exemplify his particular insight into

creative processes.

It is important to remember that Coleridge started his career

as a poet steeped in classical literature and in the tradition of

imitative verse composition. 3 His interest in poetry led him in steady

progression from the classics to Milton and the eighteenth century

nature poets, and there can be little doubt that as a young man he

3 See George Watson, Coleridge the Poet (London, 1966), Chapters 2,3 and 4.

129 understood the task of poetic composition in the eighteenth century terms of application rather than inspiration. 4 The poetry in the

1796 collection shows Coleridge largely taking his tone and material from his predecessors in order to provide location for some thought or experience of his own. Poems such as 'To An Infant' and 'The

Kiss' present a simple, domestic situation ennobled with solemnity and general significance, but Coleridge destroys the value of the experience itself by clothing it in exaggerated metaphors and a di­ dactic, moralising tone. In 'To An Infant' for example, the emotional appeal of the situation is captured immediately in a simple address -

'Ah! cease thy tears and sobs, my little life!' - 5 but the poem conti- nues with a ponderous stylistic excursion in which the final apostrophe is a grandiose appeal to a parent God before whom the poet is the toddler. Coleridge cannot reconcile the homely truths he experiences emotionally with a poetry characterised by Miltonic alliterations and balanced epithets. Lines like 'Alike the foodful fruit and scorching fire/Awake the eager grasp and young desire' (I, 91), condemn them- selves.

There is in general a strange insensitivity to the effects of bathos apparent in the 1796 'Poems'. In one instance, Coleridge expands the classical description of a village spring with its 'fresh garland of Pieran flowers' and 'zephyr-haunted brink' to include a bunch of

4 R.C. Bald has pointed out that Coleridge's reading was often con- sciously directed for poetic purposes: see "Coleridge and the Ancient Mariner," in Nineteenth Century Studies, ed. Herbert Davis- et. al. (Ithaca, New York, 1940), pp. 15-16. 5 PW, I, 91. (References throughout this chapter are to this edition.) In The Central Self (London, 1968), Patricia M. Ball has shown this poem to exemplify Coleridge's search for a poetic resolution of speci­ fic detail and abstract generalisation (pp. 84-85).

130 schoolboys who 'launch paper navies on [its] waveless breast' (I, 58-

59). A heavy-handed touch of realism like this works in opposition

to the rest of the poem which is moving in the Augustan style to

depict the motions of the river of life. In effect the Augustan tra­

dition trapped Coleridge and impeded his development of a personal

artistic sensitivity. Frequently his images are simply reworked from

classical or eighteenth century sources, 6 betraying his felt need to

confirm his stature as a poet by displaying a knowledge of precedents.

In his Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry, James Sutherland has pointed out the borrowing was an accepted part of the poet's function prior to the nineteenth century 7 but Coleridge does not seem able to

effect the transition from erudition to poetry easily. The address

'To The Author of Poems' is a case in point. The setting here is

allegorical; we are given a 'Poetic mount' at whose base 'A stream

there is, which rolls in lazy flow/ Its coal-black waters from

Oblivion's fount' and around which birds sing their poetic songs and

take their flights of fancy (I, 103). The allegory is, however,

crudely developed; the transitions are confusing and awkward and the personifications contribute little of value except to swell the

'impassion'd theme' (I, 104). Coleridge's hyperbolic figures conspire

to increase the hollowness of abstract and impersonal argument even

in poetry inspired by emotion, as, for example, the sonnets of the

1796 collection. In these particularly, objects of Coleridge's

sincere admiration are dehumanized in the poetry, emerging as statues

clothed in glory.

6 He recognised an inadequacy in himself in this respect; see PW, I, 52n. 7 A Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry (1948; rpt~ London, Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 134.

131 The weaknesses of Coleridge's early poetry are strikingly

apparent in Religious Musings, which he professed to rate most highly in 1796. 8 Poetic crudity here highlights a surprising discrepancy between the poet's philosophical acumen and his poetic sensibility.

The organized procession of didactic comments in the poem compounds quite a complex interpretation of Pantheism9 but Coleridge loses

control by trying to distance himself from the poem. He employs

traditional stylistic devices, in particular personification and epic simile, in order to lead away from direct communication and to confer grandeur and importance on the matter expressed. He surrenders plausi­ bility and atmosphere by what seems to be a deliberate use of heighte­ ning techniques and these are frequently inappropriate to the context of personal religion. Coleridge also seems to have been blind to the ugliness of the poem's diction. He returns to Miltonic periods and

Latinate idioms for his purple passages without appreciating how much power they subtract from the theme. 10 Not surprisingly even contempo- rary reviewers accused him of a language which 'sometimes becomes

turgid' as a result of 'redundancy of metaphor' and 'the frequent use of compound epithets•. 11

It is interesting that Coleridge consistently relied upon

inflation and abstraction in his early poetry when his letters of the period, especially those of 1796, show him increasingly sensitive to

8 'I rest for all my poetical credit on the Religious Musings.' (CL, I, 197) 9 As demonstrated by Herbert Piper, op.cit., pp. 47-59. 1 0 For example, one important central passage opens, 'Who the Creator love, created Might/Dread not:' (PW, I, 111). 11 Donald H. Reiman,ed., Romantics Reviewed (New York, 1972),pp. 6-7.

132 his own style. In his correspondence with John Thelwall and Thomas

Poole, he frequently displays calculated uses of irony and devalues his own laboure d diction. . wit. h se lf-conscious ' insig' ' ht • 12 In one instance he recounts a little narrative in racy style ('I left him it was now dark and into pits & out of pits, and against stones

& over stones I contrived to stumble some mile and a half') to cone- lude with humour by evoking in a homely cottage a 'tall old Hag, whose soul-gelding Ugliness would chill to eternal chastity a cantharidized

S a t yr ••• ' ( I , 182 ) . 1 3 To Thomas Poole he deliberately effects bathos by bursting his own eulogism; his famous 'Dear Gutter of Stowy! were I transported to the Italian Plains, and lay by the side of a strearnlet that murmured thro' an Orange-Grove, I would think of thee, dear Gutter of Stowy! and wish that I were poring on thee!' is followed abruptly by, 'So much by way of Rant. - I have eat three Eggs, swallowed sundries of Tea & Bread and Butter ••• ' (I, 217-218). The poet who takes himself so seriously in his poems is seen here in quite another

light. But this kind of witty self-devaluation is Coleridge's method of concealing the vulnerability of his personality and its price is an

evident loss of sincerity. Furthermore by ridiculing his own tendency

to rely on classical devices, he implies an insecurity about his abili-

ties as a poet. Coleridge is apparently aware that, for all its passionate

opinion, his poetry by-passes the soul of its creator. There is parti­

cularly nice irony in the way in which he chooses to represent himself

in the act of poetic composition to : '[I] shall continue

in the stirrups', he says with earthly weariness, before correcting him­

self: 'that is, shall not dismount my Pegasus, till Monday morning ••• '

12 Other examples could be cited, as for example, the third paragraph of the letter to the Rev. John Edwards, CL, I, 191-192. (Hereafter references in the text are to this edition of Coleridge's letters.) 13 The calculation with which this line was written is also suggested by the idea's having been noted in the Gutch Memorandum Book (Notebooks, I, 138).

133 (I, 191). This kind of comment exposes Coleridge's awareness of the nature of his art and suggests an underlying dissatisfaction with his own kind of self-conscious creativity.

Coleridge did not disregard or reject the criticisms of the reviewers of 1796, primarily I think because of his desire to present a mature artist's viewpoint to his correspondents and friends. It was

their influence which prompted him to reconsider the value of his

'poetical' vocabulary and diction. The letters again are revealing.

He gradually recognized John Thelwall's plain-thinking intelligence and sent him a copy of the 'Poems' with apologies for 'much effeminacy of sentiment, much faulty glitter of expression' (I, 205). Later, his recognition of Poole's unsophisticated good sense and Thelwall's pre­

ference for 'severe & unadorned reasoning' (I, 215) provoked his ad­ missions of 'Vicious affectation in the phraseology' of Religious

Musings (I, 207) , its 'rage, & affectation of double Epithets' (I, 215) and the 'garishness & swell of diction' in many of his poems (I, 278).

Gradually Coleridge was encouraged to recognise the grace of simplicity and to clarify his thought about the appropriateness of poetic diction

in specific contexts. On one occasion he argues thoughtfully with

Thelwall on the 'Della-crusca place of Emphasis' (I, 216). He defends

some of his own phrases but concurs that 'where we wish to point out

the thing, and the quality is mentioned merely as a decoration, this mode of information is indeed absurd - therefore I very patiently give

up to critical vengeance high tree, sore wounds, and rough rock'.

Coleridge is thus seen to be refining his critical acumen with regard

to linguistic appropriateness and precision. Similarly when he analyses

the imagery in some of Southey's poetry, his criterion is the 'natural

and perspicuous' (I, 291). Southey's allusion to the 'Temple of Paean'

134 provokes the criticism that effect is lost because Southey has 'faultily mixed spiritual with corporeal, allegorical meanings with meanings pre­ dicable only of .•• bricks and mortar'. Coleridge's perception unfortu­ nately fails to function in his own composition at this time 14 but his

critical awareness is occasionally self-directed; in December 1796 he is able to write to Thelwall, 'As to my own poetry I do confess that it frequently both in thought & language deviates from "nature & simplicity:•'

(I, 278)

These emphases on the natural and simple in poetry towards the end of 1796 indicate the beginnings of the most significant change in

Coleridge's attitudes to poetry. Gradually his adherence to preestab-

lished conventions underwent modification, not only in the language but also in the thought content of his poems. A central feature of the good poet in the Augustan age was his capacity for reflection and generalisa­

tion. What Norman Callan has said of Thomson may as easily be applied

to many of his contemporaries:

[Thomson] does not aim at shocking his audience by insisting on his individuality; he merges himself in the general consciousness of his readers, pointing to what they have in common and ignoring what separates them. 15

The business of the poet was to be general and public, not personal and private, and, as we have seen from his subject matter and use of imagery,

Coleridge subscribed to this practice to a large extent. It is never-

14 In the Biographia he acknowledges his failings as a young poet with the comment: My judgment was stronger, than were my powers of realizing its dictates; and the faults of my language, though indeed partly owing to ..• the desire of giving a poetic colouring to abstract and metaphysical truths •.• did yet ... originate in unfeigned diffidence of my own comparative talent. (I, 3) 15 "Augustan Reflective Poetry," From Dryden to Johnson, The Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 4 (1957; rpt. Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 353.

135 theless striking from a reading of the 1796 'Poems' how often Coleridge's personal vision acts as the mainspring for the thought progression of a poem and how often it is the personal significance of some detail of his mental life which confers value upon the depicted experience. One example, "Lines Composed While Climbing the teft Ascent of Breckley

Coomb" provides an interesting comparison with John Dyer's Grongar

Hill. On arriving at the top of a hill and moved by the prospect of

the sun on the surrounding landscape, Dyer is prompted to abstract a moral:

But transient is the Smile of Fate! A little Rule, a little Sway, A Sunbeam in a Winter's Day Is all the Proud and Mighty Have, Between the Cradle and the Grave. 16

Coleridge, on the other hand, in an identical situation relates the natural scene to its effect on his own emotional constitution: "Deep sighs my lonely heart: I drop the tear:/Enchanting spot! 0 were my

Sara here!" (I, 94) 17 This is a crude attempt to link simplicity of diction and idiom with the poet's expression of his inward experiences and their relation to the world of nature. It has been suggested that

Coleridge was perhaps influenced by Wordsworth in this, whose contempo-

rary poem Incidents Upon Salisbury Plain uses simple, descriptive

language in drawing out the relationship between nature and human emo­

tional experience. 18 Coleridge had received an early copy of the poem

and obviously admired it. 19 There is in any event significant indica-

16 D.N. Smith, ed., The Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (London, 1926), p. 272. 17 Richard Haven has made this same comparison as exemplifying Coleridge's attempt to articulate an emotional state rather than an intellectual attitude; op. ci t., p. 49. 18 See,for example, House, p. 63. 19 CL, I, 215. See also Griggs' footnote, CL, I, 216.

136 tion that Coleridge wanted to move away from abstract representation

to the poetry of primary experience. In his "Lines on a Friend Who

~~ed of a Frenzy Fever ••• ' (I, 76~78), for example, while the thought proceeds characteristically from the particular death to the universal issue ('Tell me, cold grave! is Death with poppies crowned?'), it moves via a verse-paragraph of purely personal statement. The questions of universal relevance are then made to arise in the poet's mind as he has been depicted in the poem. Unfortunately the physical description of the poet, sitting down beside the grave, "sloth-jaundic'd all", is unintegrated and inappropriate to the progression of the theme. Un­ resolved tension between the ego-centricity of the poet and Augustan poetic practice obstructs the flow of the poetry.

Coleridge defends poetic 'egotism' in the Preface to the

1796 'Poems' against the typical attack that the public could not be interested in personal sermons and descriptions. 20 Then a little further on he exclaims enthusiastically, 'With what anxiety every fashionable author avoids the word I!' 21 The role in the poem of the poet's identity was clearly a subject of inte~est to him even before he had exploited

its potential. Perhaps it was because Coleridge instinctively felt

the value of his mental experiences that he came correspondingly to feel

the poetic validity of individualistic vision. He concedes to Thelwall

that poetry must be to some extent obscure if only a minority of its

readers is familiar with the thought content, but he still shows himself

20 JDC, p. 538. Coleridge also noted in the Gutch Memorandum Book, 'Poetry without egotism oomparatively uninteresting' (Notebooks, I, 62). 2 1 JDC, p. 538.

137 emotionally disinclined to cx,ndemn such obscurity~ 22 What Coleridge needs at this time is a poetic fonnula by which to raise the status of the poet's expression of his own emotional experiences. He even­

tually did hit upon an ingredient which was to liberate him from the

constraints of the Augustan tradition, in the form of a listener made present in the poem. 23 Shape and significance are conferred upon self-expression by making it form a piece of direct personal communi­

cation and furthermore, the delineation in outline of a specific

listening figure necessarily involves clarification of the role of

the speaking persona. By this method Coleridge was forced to con-

centrate on tightening up the presentation of a personal vision. He worked on the monologue technique to give expression to his own egoism: it was never developed dramatically and when, later, he needed to

distance the creating mind from the narrating voice (as, for example,

in The Ancient Mariner and ), he used more subtle means than

the creation of character. For Coleridge the poem almost inevitably makes reference to the mind that creates it. 24

Two poems written around September/October 1795 demonstrate

a sudden improvement in Coleridge's control of egotistical poetry.

The earlier of these, 'Lines Written at Shurton Bars', is addressed

formally to the poet's wife-to-be while they are separated. There is

thus immediate and overt justification for using the poetry as a

22 See CL, I, 277-278. 23 This point has been made by others, for example Patricia Ball, op.cit., p. 86. 24 The whole issue of authorial role is the subject of a dissertation by Judith Barbour entitled Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Theory and Poetry of the Self (Unpublished M.A. Thesis, University of Sydney, 1969). Here also Coleridge's movement towards poetry of 'personal emotions unrestrained by form' (p. 185) is argued from a reading of the early poems: see pp. 170-227.

138 vehicle for the exploration of his own emotional condition. 25 But having discovered an appropriate structure, Coleridge still finds difficulty in developing a suitably personal imagery to convey states of feeling. In 'Shurton Bars' he tries to effect the movement from perception to introspection by way of natural images. The poet is depicted rejecting the twinkling of the star and glow-worm in favour of the violent activity of a raging storm as more appropriate

to rouse him from his present mood of imaginative depression. The creative impulse is provided by the moaning wind and raging tides which the poet hears as he writes the poem, and at this point, the successful intercourse of cosmic and human moods quickens the reader's appreciation of the poetic context. Coleridge prepares the reader for

the storm image with conventional metaphors, an ' aching void' , a sable wand and even 'Dim-visag'd shapes of Dread' (I, 97). He then extends the significance of the image, as description of the weather gives way

to visualization; the storm lashes around 'one solitary pile', the

lighthouse tower, from which the watchfire twink~es to the lonely

'dozing Tar' (I, 98). The image thus provides nature's emblem for both

the outer circumstances of the lovers and for their inner experiences.

Coleridge reinforces the ideas of darkness and dread by using memory of himself, full of inertia in such a storm, 'in black soul-jaundic'd

fit/A sad gloom-pamper'dMan' (I, 98). But he loses effectiveness because he tends naturally to stock associations and hyperbole, here expanding the image to represent a shipwreck on the storm of life.

Throughout all this the reader is aware that short enforced separation

is the only horror which oppresses the lovers, a situation demanding

25 Coleridge still felt the need to offer some explanation to the public and added a verse motto in the 1796 publication, as a pseudo apology for this use of the monologue (PW, I, 96).

139 the more appropriately milder emotions captured in the subsequent image of the droop of skylarks' wings amid the com. Eventually, after a

somewhat inconsequential return to the storm image, the poem ends

abruptly with a return to light, as the poet's 'love-charg'd eye' is

compared to one of nature's wonders, a flashing flower.

Coleridge's experiment with natural images to represent mental

and emoti-onal states does not succeed in this poem. 2 6 In addition to

frequent over-sentimentality, he also tends to exploit the image for its own sake in relation to its emotional referent, without concern for its

role in the total structure of the poem. The suggestive features of

the imagery, for example the 'shapes of Dread' and the blackness and grief associated with the sable wand, storm and shipwreck, or the

twinkling of the glow-wonn and lighthouse and the light of the golden

flower, occur haphazardly and do not relate to any unifying theme. The

images are abruptly and oddly juxtaposed so that the poem constitutes no more than a series of associated thoughts with no subtly fluctuating

emotional mood being allowed to develop. Nature is used to provide parallels for human experience but the chosen images are largely struc­

tured around traditional associations and so they remain empty of psycho­

logical meaning. Even where Coleridge shows himself to be depending on

his own experience for the substance of his imagery, as with the flashing

flower he had discovered in his reading, there is little suggestion of

that interpenetration of the thinking mind and the living world of nature

which he later recognised as one of the main sources of poetic life.

2 6 An opposing view is given by G. Little in "' Lines Written at Shurton Bars': Coleridge's First Conversation Poem?" Southern Review, 2(1966), 137-149, where the poem's limitations are argued to be 'not radically damaging' (p. 141) .

140 There are several features of the Coleridgean 'Conversation' poem in 'Shurton Bars', especially in its structural organization.

The poem moves with the thought sequence of the poet, and the initial

emphasis on the eye introduces the significant 'systolic rhythm' in

rudimentary form as the poet alternately looks outward to nature and

inward to the workings of his 'Fancy'. 27 This rhythm, however, gra-

dually conflicts with the larger movements of the poem. In the time

structure, present and past give way to future; in the tho9ght se­ quence, perception passes through introspection to a climax of con­

templated action. The poet's eye is used as the pivotal organ so that viewpoint can be manoeuvred from outward-looking to inward-looking but

Coleridge handles the technique naively and crudely. In the final

stanza the incongruous 'flashing flower' image forces a return to the

activity of the eye in an attempt to consolidate the motions of the poetry but Coleridge fails to achieve the desired coherence because

the eye imagery has not been fully developed as an organizing principle.

The 'Conversational' mode in 'Shurton Bars' is only skeletal primarily because Coleridge leaves the reader aware of the 'shaping

hand' of the poet. The stultifying effects which he admits in his prose,

are here exemplified in the poetry. The presence of the poet as persona

in the poem has provided Coleridge with a useful structural device, but

there remains a split between the random associative thought processes

of this poet/persona and the directing mind of the poet himself. The

2 7 The basic 'conveisational' structure as propounded by A. Gerard in "Systolic Rhythm: The Structure of Coleridge's Conversation Poems" (Twentieth Century Views, pp. 78-87) is supported in detail by Little.

141 abrupt transitions of imagery and mood betray a distance between the poet and his persona which Coleridge subtly dissolved as he developed

the 'conversational' mode. The ineffectiveness of the early poetry has been ascribed by at least one critic to precisely the opposite fault, to Coleridge's spontaneous expression of powerful feelings. 28

Such comment is perhaps inspired by the poet's indulgence in emotiona­ lism, especially in a poem like 'Shurton Bars' where emotional atti­ tudes may be directly assigned to the poet/persona. To me, however, the failure lies rather in the evident calculation with which the poet has selected images by which to render emotional and imaginative ex- periences. The images emerge rigidly with predefined connotations so the very emotions which they embody seem contrived. As a result the poem as a whole finally fails to convey the free flow of imaginative processes which is its aim. It may then be concluded that the poet himself has largely been unable to release those free, unconscious modes of association which he later declared were the mark of genius.

I have indicated that Coleridge was aware of the kind of difficulty he experienced as a young poet and that his problems contributed to a developing theory of value in poetry. In 'The Nightingale', written in April 1798 when most of his best work was behind him, he condemns

the self-conscious poet who depends on other people's emotional ex­ periences for the stuff of his poetry.

But some night-wandering man whose heart was pierced ••• First named these notes a melancholy strain. And many a poet echoes the conceit; Poet who hath been building up the rhyme When he had better far hath stretched his limbs

28 Patricia Ball introduces an otherwise interesting discussion of Coleridge's methods in the early poetry by saying that he 'breaks into verse to give vent to his ideas when they assail him at a pitch of excitement' (op.cit., p. 82).

142 Beside a brook... to the influxes Of shapes and sounds and shifting elements Surrendering his own spirit••• (I, 264-265)

The inadequacy of rationally constructed works of art was obviously a hard lesson for Coleridge; he had expressed a similar theme in the sonnet to Lamb over two years earlier ('Thus far my scanty brain hath built the rhyme/Elaborate and swelling: yet the heart/Not owns it••• '

[I, 78]). In the 'Conversation' poem there was to be no 'building'; the poet must be free to respond intuitively to the forces of nature and to achieve subsequent balance of conscious and unconscious mental processes as this response is transformed to poetry.

It has frequently been noted that the first poem to achieve the necessary integration of the art form and the imaginative experience which it embodies, is 'The Eolian Harp'. This poem was written only about one month after 'Shurton Bars' and it constitutes an imaginative coalescence of many of the principles of poetry which Coleridge had been working towards. I do not want to discuss this poem in detail because it has already been dealt with several times in discussions of this kind. 29 The poem acts as a marker-buoy in Coleridge's development as a poet and, as Richard Haven has shown, it indicates most importantly the poet's 'discovering as an artist how he can embody in a verbal structure his exploration of his own consciousness•. 30 It is approp-

29 See, for example, James D. Boulger, "Imagination and Speculation in Coleridge's Conversation Poems," J.E.G.P., 64(1965), 693-699; A. Gerard, "Counterfeiting Infinity: 'The Eolian Harp' and the Growth of Coleridge's Mind," J.E.G.P., 60(1961), 411-422; George McLean Harper, "Coleridge's Conversation Poems," in English Romant:.ic Poets, ed. M.H. Abrams (1960; rpt. New York, 1966), pp. 144-157; Richard Haven, op.cit., pp. 57-63; House, pp. 73-78 and William Walsh, Coleridge: The Work and the Relevance (1967; rpt. London, 1973), pp. 97-102. 30 op. ci t., p. 63.

1.11.-:t riate here only to re-emphasise one or two points about the poem's imagery and structure. In 'The Eolian Harp' the reader experience,s the poem in its entirety as the controlled representation of a mental experience defined by its sequence in time. Humphrey House makes the salient point that here all things are made to contribute

to a deeper psychological analysis than previously, the descriptive passages being more intricately and closely knit to their psycholo­ gical effects. 31 There is a notable improvement in the concentration of imagery; not only are natural images used to create atmosphere,

linking the poet's emotional transitions to the world apparent to him, but they are also made to act as correlatives for a growing con­ sciousness of the mental processes themselves. By choosing images from the poet's immediate surroundings in the context of the poem,

Coleridge has successfully shifted the emphasis from abstraction to reality and the here-and-now, giving validity and impact to the poetic expression of a solitary thought process.

On the other hand, however, the tendency to immediacy and detailed definition causes one of the poem's major flaws with respect

to its imagery. As the associated images of breeze, harp and music

first emerge, the reader is moved by the rich suggestiveness of the breeze, with its own mysterious life force, of the harp's 'half­ yielding' motion 'like some coy maid' in the sway of both active and passive responses, and of the emerging music which rises and falls with sinuous movement. The points of contact between the images them-

3 1 House, p. 73.

144 selves and their referents in psychological activity are left suffi­

ciently small to allow for maximum suggestibility so that the shifting mental kaleidoscope is effectively conveyed. 32 The difficulties begin to arise when Coleridge embarks on a more specific identification of

correspondences between tenor and vehicle,giving the central figure of the harp too great a concreteness as an image of the mind. As

Coleridge reverts to allegorising the imagery loses its power of sug­ gestion and an ambiguity is exposed. An active function of the mind is clearly depicted in the swell of faery imagery in the second stanza of the poem and the resulting joy and rhythm of the 'soft floating witchery of sound' (I, 101) are felt to be positive components of the experience. Later, the complexity of the creative process becomes con- fused when the harp is equated with the 'indolent and passive brain' in its reception of 'flitting fantasies' which are now denigrated as

'idle' because unrelated to personal productivity. Critics have con­ sistently felt the major flaw in 'The Eolian Harp' to lie at the end of the poem where the poet meekly accepts 'reproof' from Sara after exhibiting such delight in the shapings of his own 'unregenerate mind'

(I, 102), and it is significant that the poet's increasing passivity

in the poem coincides with the isolation of the single constricting

conceit.

It is in 'The Eolian Harp' too that we see the beginnings

of the work of art as organism. The play of the poet's intellect, which in this case clearly involves his emotional responses, directs

32 These effects are confirmed and reset by the lines (26-33) which Coleridge added in 1817, realigning the whole process with the vitality of nature (PW, I, 101).

145 the movement and pace of the poem. There is a new freedom of asso­

ciative activity, both of the response of the poet to nature and of

the poet to himself in response, so that the minds of the poet and his persona are fused into one dawning self-consciousness. The associated images are unconsciously stimulated as the poem progresses suggesting some parallel with the mental activity of Coleridge him­ self. House has taken up this idea in his comment that the unsatis­

factory conclusion to the poem is perhaps the result of Coleridge's moral suspicion of those 'uncurb'd' and 'unruddered' associations which may be recognised in the act of poetic composition. 33 Signi­

ficantly, however, the values that emerge with greatest emphasis within the context of the poem are those which are expressed as spon­

taneous convictions characterised by joy, rather than those consciously imposed upon the thought process. In this respect the final opinion of the poet is felt to be an attempt to harness the fluid movement of

thought and the ideas lose not only their psychological but also their poetic validity. The complex inter-relationship of psychology and poetry which Coleridge is here developing, gives the clue to his later

descriptions of the organic nature of art. As the poet's mind is felt

to 'grow' to increased depth of vision within the poem, the poetry

takes on a life of its own in which structure and imagery coalesce with meaning to form a complete experience. Thus the organic growth of the poet's mind in the poem constitutes the growth of the poem and this is

fundamentally Coleridge's aesthetic in its practical application.

The poem which exemplifies most perfectly the nature of orga-

3 3 House, p. 77.

146 nic poetry is 'Frost at Midnight'. Here Coleridge achieves the full integration of freedom and control which, in aesthetic terms, is needed to sponsor growth. Again, by means of the conversational mode he uses the individual mental experience of the poet as the ground for the induction of theoretical principles, but in this poem the mind growing to self-knowledge is so perfectly realized that the prin­ ciples which it embraces are woven smoothly into the fabric of the poem. It is again Hlllllphrey House who succinctly notes the poem's final achievement when he suggests that it 'leaves us with a quite extraordinary sense of the mind's very being, in suspense, above time and space'. 34 By means of interacting references to the creative mentality,the persona is fused with the poet himself as the poem proceeds and the resulting figure, which I have called the poet/persona, allows the psychological experience to play a part in its own artistic elaboration. In her study of his theory of the 'self' in poetry,

Judith Barbour makes the salient point that for Coleridge, there is

'not an absolute separation of the man who suffers from the mind which

creates but an adjustment or gearing up of their existential interdepen­ dence into creative co-operation'. 35 Here, the image of the mind-in­

action grows to embrace the whole poem, just as, on the smaller scale, the mind in which this image is conceived, is experienced as growing

to a new position of knowledge within the poem.

34 House, p. 81. In an article entitled "The Theme of Self-Realization Ill 'Frost at Midnight'" (S .I .R., 7 [1967), 34-39), Michael Sundell quarrels with the emphasis of this comment as implying 'something quite cont;rary t;o t;he essence of Coleridge's thought' (p. 34). Sundell continues t;o discuss the poem, as I shall do, in the light of its dramatisation of dynamic thought processes. House's instinctive feeling about the value of the poem remains important, however, be­ cause the symbolism is such t;hat the poem creat;es a total experience into which both 'being' and 'becoming' are assimilated. 35 op.cit., p. 55.

147 At the opening of the poem the atmosphere of silence, still­ ness and cold belies a richness of activity which is only barely per­ ceptible to the 'musing' persona and which is in one way quite sepa­ rate from him in his situation of cozy wannth and human contact. A connection is established, however, and simple description has special relevance because Coleridge's focus is not upon nature but upon the actual musing process of the poet. The solitary man is forced into perception of nature's self-motivated expansiveness and simultaneously he recognises the autonomous life of the non-thinking baby beside him.

It is the deceptive atmosphere of calm which initially prevents his own meditation, keeping him locked in the world of the senses, straining self-consciously to feel the inaudible 'numberless goings-on of life'

(I, 240). The accumulating images of vitality in nature (the frost, the wind, the owlet's cry and the sea, hill and wood) give way as the poet's attention wanders, to the central indoor image of the 'low-burn't' fire 36 and gradually the reader recognises echoing suggestions of rele­ vance to the mental experience of the poet himself. The 'thin blue flame' with its hint of imaginative transparency, lies low and 'quivers not' (I, 240), but there is activity in the room, notably that of the

'film' which flutters on the grate. Now with a sure hand, Coleridge uses direct comparison to bring all previous suggestion to a point of crystallisation. The film, 'the sole unquiet thing' is a companionable fonn to the non-progressive mental flickering of the poet/persona. In the human activity, however, there is always for Coleridge, the super­ added possibility of self-awareness. Here the potential for mental growth is indicated by the identification of an 'idling Spirit' which, though momentarily sterile because restricted to analysing its own

'puny flaps and freaks', is by its very name given a power of possibi-

36 The centrality of this image is noted in House, p. 79.

1.:1.A lity distinguishable from the immediate operations of thought (I, 240-

241).

The first verse-paragraph of 'Frost at Midnight' thus moves in psychological terms from passive perception to the activity, if unproductive, of self-awareness. The imagery contributes to this sense of development by means of its undefinitive nature; a personal symbolism accumulates gradually through suggestion and evocation. 37 Coleridge's aim in passing swiftly from the frost and wind to the sea, hill and wood, and then immediately to the flame and film, leaving each image unexpanded, is to oommunicate with the reader through intimation rather than statement. In this we see Coleridge beginning to inoorporate into the symbol that quality of numinous experience which emerges from the unknown element of personality, hinting all the time at the eternal in the individual. Changing perspectives of oonsciousness are conveyed, as W.K. Wimsatt has shown most clearly, by means of an imagery accumu­ lating 'the faint, the shifting, the least tangible and most mysterious parts of nature'. 38 And Coleridge's power as a poet lies in his handling of nuance, in his linking the psychological to the natural so that the operations of each are heightened in intensity and significance.

His most clearly defined image at this point in 'Frost at Midnight' is that of the film whose 'dim sympathies' with the poet/persona are oon­ veyed by vague suggestion rather than by any specified descriptive reference. As depicting a step towards apprehension of the spiritual, the image of the film is as tenuous as its function at this point in

37 The way this kind of symbolism works is outlined in modezn terms by Edmund Wilson in Axel's Castle (1931; rpt. London, 1969), pp. 22- 27. 38 W.K. Wimsatt, "The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery," p. 32.

149 the poem demands, but with the continuation of psychological development, it may be seen to have acted as a true Coleridgean symbol, an important node, marking growth and sponsoring it further.

The general amorphousness achieved when images work primarily by implication is extremely appropriate to poetic depiction of the release of unconscious streams of thought and Coleridge successfully exploits this appropriateness. There is now an easy transition from the personal significance of the film to its metaphorical interpretation as portending a new strain of activity. Description and 'Thought' are gently transformed into a less consciously motivated vision of memory ' which, in its turn, becomes a dream of childhood. This dream emerges in spontaneous associative responses, free of the sterilizing activity of the 'self-watching subtilizing mind' ( I, 241n). The release of unconscious flow is positive and conducive to a 'wild pleasure' in the

child, yet this childish naivety is not presented as the simple

desirable cure for the adult poet's psychological deadlock. Michael

Sundell has argued that Coleridge feels 'he cannot reach identity with

the world' because of his dominating self-consciousness, and that he places his present state in antithesis to that of his childhood when

'he was able to achieve communion with the infinite'. 39 An important point about this view is that it is based on the ass-wnption that

Coleridge here distinguishes between man's imaginative experience of

nature and his subsequent elaboration of this experience in art. In

a poem of this kind, however, there is no such distinction because it

presents the capture of the actual moment of creative response. The

artefact is felt to be achieved even as the moment which gives it

birth is experienced. Herein lies the importance of recognising that

39 op.cit., p. 37.

150 separation may only be assumed between the poet and the poet/persona; within the poem itself there is no separation of processes and the growth of the persona's mind is simultaneously the growth of the work of art. Specifically in this case, Michael Sundell does not notice that the lack of psychological control which is characteristic of the child's power to associate freely is shown to foster no growth towards self-awareness,or spiritual awakening. The child's dream ends abruptly where it began, without enlightenment for the child himself who remains a prey to the conflicting emotions of fear (occasioned by the 'stern preceptor' and the 'swirmning book' [I, 241]) and love (of 'Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved ••• [I, 242]). In the context of memory, however, the childhood dream provides an increase in self-knowledge for the poet/persona and gives him new understanding with reference to his baby.

The poetic emphasis at the opening of the third verse-paragraph

is on rhythm. By re-entering the unrestricted mental world of himself

as a child, the poet/persona has succeeded in loosening the bonds of

self-consciousness a little and has laid himself open to the rhythmic movements of the natural world. It is the baby's breathing which first

breaks into his 'Thought', promoting his entry into a new dream in

which he experiences complete release of his own powers of unconscious

association. This release is effected by a personal identification

with the rhythmic forces and by what Humphrey House has called the 'pre­

dominant emotion' in the poem, 'the deep, tender affection for the child' : 0

A profound sense of psychological relaxation is experienced as the mind

moves from specific details of its own past 'pent mid cloisters dim',

towards heightened imaginative concentration (I, 242, 11. 50-56). With

nice resolution of free response and conscious appreciation of his new

40 House, p. 81.

, c;, understanding the poet/persona begins to create for himself a struc­ tured image of his baby's mental growth. The initial stage in this growth is perception and by perception of nature's phenomena the baby will gradually recognise its own life and its affinity with the living world. In this vision Coleridge agains uses single images to concent­ rate a large area of suggestion into a small field of poetic activity.

The babe wandering· 'like a breeze' under its own self-motivated impetus, will gain awareness of the interpenetration of natural phenomena (as the clouds 'image in their bulk both lakes and shores/ And mountain crags' [I, 242]) and through his own interpenetration with nature will experience the dawn of self-consciousness. Perception thus leads to intelligence by which the child will read the vital, intelligible

'language' of nature whose message is the living presence of God. The growth of the embryo mind to spiritual awareness will be a natural un­ folding of potential resulting in the new man's perfect grasp of his own role in the world of nature. In fulfilling this role he must recog­ nise and accept the responsibility of his intelligent self-consciousness, responding at each level to the challenge of growth by involving his whole being so that each discovery naturally provokes a new search.

'Frost at Midnight' draws to its close by effecting what George

McLean Harper nominated a 'return'. 41 The world of nature depicted at the opening of the poem is reintroduced, but in significantly new tenns.

Growing naturally out of the poet/persona's intensifying thought pro­ cesses, the final paragraph presents to the reader a poetic vision, heightened and controlled by its creator. Where at the opening natural

4 l op.cit., p. 150.

152 phenomena are employed poetically as ancillary to a theme of mental

growth, here all are absorbed into the vision of universal creativity which represents a climax of imaginative concentration. In addition

to their exhibition of organic forces in nature, some of the images

are for Coleridge especially suggestive of the activity of the imagi­

nation. Sundell has shown the relevance of the continuous impercep-

tible expansion of frost, and the imaginative connotations of the moon,

the bird's song and the 'trances of the blast' are readily appreciated when taken in conjunction with some of Coleridge's other poems, notably

'The Nightingale' and 'Dejection: An Ode'. An interesting image in

this context is the smoke in the sun-thaw. Coleridge frequently asso-

ciates a cottage, sun, snow and occasionally a breeze, in a cluster of

images centred upon curling smoke or mist. These form a symbolic group

relating to a similar one combining the moon and its half-light in mist

or cloud, 42 and together they afford Coleridge not only an appropriate

atmosphere but also a paradigm for the imagination. Significantly all

the images in this passage depict activity, whether actual or latent,

and Coleridge employs them to contribute by accumulated suggestion to

the poetic realization of an unfluctuating height of mental activity.

Thus he achieves that total resolution of being and becoming, of

finite and infinite, which is the specific achievement of the symbo­

lising imagination. The beauty and power of the last stanza lie not

only in felicity of description but, more significantly, in the perfect

reproduction of that 'steady fervor of a mind possessed and filled

with the grandeur of its subject' 43 which is the apex of the mental

growth process.

42 These 'symbolic clusters' have been discussed by Warren (pp. 234-250), Marshall Suther (The Dark Night of Samuel Taylor Coleridge [Columbia, 1960], pp.92-118) and E.W. Gose ("Coleridge and the Luminous Gloom," PMLA, 75 [1960], 238-244). They have also been documented by Lowes, c:ip;'cit., p. 408n. 43 BL,II,68. Walsh seems to imply something similar to this when he says that in this stanza 'the nervous movements of human consciousness have been replaced by the steadiness of organic growth.'(Coleridge,p.128).

153 Critics following Harper have continued to comment on the

'return' teehn ique. o f th e conversation. poems, 44 but Albert G~rard has made the point that I wish to emphasise here, that, in fact, 'it is not a return, for the self to which the poet finally turns back is not the same self from which he had started.' 45 In other words the spiral shape of organic development has been fully integrated with the movement of the poetry, exemplifying Coleridge's 'eddy' in the synthesis of psychology and poetry. 46 The pattern of imaginative activity which

Coleridge described as that of the serpentine 'path of sound through air' is, on another occasion, said to resemble the movements of a 'white rose of Eddy-foam' which, 'for ever overpowered by the Stream rushing down in upon it, and still obstinate in resurrection ••• spread up into the scallop, by fits & starts, blossoming in a moment into a full flower.~ 7

The psychological significance of the eddy in this example has been sum- marised as the 'reciprocal action between a developing mind and a cease­ lessly flowing world of experience' 48 and, by extension, where the or- ganic growth of imagination is the subject of a poem, the 'eddy' has obvious relation to the structure of the art form itself. Coleridge once rather sweepingly declared that it is the common end of all poetry to

'convert a series to a whole':

to make those events, which in real or imagined history move in a straight line, assume to our Understanding a circular motion, the Snake with it's Tail in it's Mouth. 49

44 See, for example, Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (New York,1961), p.216:'The poem comes full circle, back to its opening.' and Max F. Schulz's argument in The Poetic Voices of Coleridge (1963; rpt. Detroit, 1964) that unity is here dependent on a 'curving pattern of emotion', or a 'circular progression of thought' (p.82). 45 "Systolic Rhythm," p. 85. 46 A similar assumption forms the basis of G.H. Gilpin's article "Coleridge and the Spiral of Poetic Thought" (S .E. L. ,12 [1972] ,639-652) which em­ phasises the relationship between the spiral structure of the conver­ sation poems and their suggestion of infinity. 47 Notebooks, I, 1589. 48 Allan Grant, A Preface to Coleridge (London, 1972), p. 87. 4 9 CL, IV, 5 45 • 154 The 'eddy' is a useful structural image in this context, having the additional benefit of conveying movement as well as shape. Coleridge certainly seems to have had the assimilative energies of the creative imagination in mind when he used the term as addressed to Wordsworth in 'Dejection: An Ode'. The elder poet's 'lofty song' is attributed to his intuitive rapport and sustained interaction with the structures of natural organisms: 'To thee do all things live from pole to pole,/

Their life the eddying of thy living soul! 150

In 'Frost at Midnight' the mind grows to fulfilment of itself in imagination through its interpenetration with the continuing process of self-realization in nature. The larger consequences of this re­ lationship are subtly implied by the imagery throughout the poem; suc­ cessful interpenetration confirms man's kinship and natural affinity with nature. Existentially the poet/persona finds a positive experience in the two-fold process of simultaneous psychological and artistic crea­ tivity. Growth itself affords the key to the living universe and in the faith of this, the growth of the mind which is the subject of the poem is extended to become itself a symbol of the life principle. Life itself is recreated symbolically by the poem, though only one form of specific reference is made to it and that is in the repeated phrase

'secret ministry' (I, 240 and 242). Coleridge's insight is masterful here; he exploits the full meanings of each of these words in order to obtain maximum suggestibility from their combination. By rendering the energy of the life force in the noun 'ministry', Coleridge captures its activity, its authority and above all for him, its rendering of service, that is, its productive interplay with some second and lesser phenome­ non, such as matter. The energy is necessarily 'secret' being myste­ rious in origin and known only in its manifestation in physical substance.

50 PW, I, 369n.

155 As I have argued earlier, the peculiar transformation of the life force into each of its various fo:rms ensures for Coleridge that each thing is an island, isolated and solitary in its uniqueness. And this world­ view has obvious significance for the poet/persona, here depicted as trying to reach out from the prison of his own mind to contact the wider forces at work in the world. His psychological situation is perfectly imaged in his physical encapsulation in the claustrophobic and sluggish atmosphere of comfort and warmth in his small room as contrasted with the brisk activity of the midnight cold without. 51 It is Coleridge's aim, however, to present in 'Frost at Midnight' the very process by which we know that this loneliness of isolation is not that of alienation; the 'secret ministry' which operates in nature is one with that which the persona of this poem recognises at work within himself and simultaneously with that in which the reader also, by means of his direct experience of mental growth in the poem, finds himself inextricably involved. This is the implication of the poetry of growth; it demands the participation of those who make that act of consent in submitting to its sphere of in­ fluence.

The triumph of 'Frost at Midnight' is that the poetry provides the correlative for its central philosophy. Its method relies specifi­ cally on the interrelation of images so that poetic unity is achieved on 'gestalt' principles. To use Coleridge's terms, the 'parts' are subordinated to the 'whole' while each plays its individual role in the accumulation of suggestion. The success of this method depends, as I

51 The importance of this atmosphere is two-fold as it may also be seen to act as a catalyst in the release of mental activity whi eh follows. In a modern psychological study, Marion Milner comments that, 'Creative absent-mindedness (or "reverie") sometimes requires an external, cocoon-like setting.' (The Hands of the Living God (London, 1969), p. 269)

156 have indicated, on the poet's control of a given area of implication and Coleridge was to exploit its possibilities further. The most consequential step he made was by way of the supernatural. Super­ natural manifestations bring the projected desires, fears and fore­ bodings of the individual to a focal point which constitutes its own representation of the mysterious and powerful world of the not-self.

A comment in the late work Aids to Reflection, endorses Coleridge's ready association of supernatural manifestation with the realization of mental activity, especially of the activity of the will. He suggests that 'whatever originates its own acts, or in any sense con­ tains in itself the cause of its own state, must be spiritual, and consequently super-natural ••• And such must the responsible WILL in us be, if it be at all.' 52 Then by means of a 'super-natural' symbo­ lism, intuitively grasped and formally structured by the mind of the poet, there results a poetry of living processes, definable as such because of its necessary interaction with the mental life of its readers.

The full poetic significance of such symbolic manifestation depends upon personal interpretation yet its aesthetic function can be carefully manipulated. Coleridge suggests in the Biographia Literaria that experience of the supernatural redirects the mind to the world outside itself, while his own aim in contributing to the Lyrical

Ballads was to use the supernatural in poetry 'so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth ••• ' (II, 6)53

This transference is achieved magnificently in The Rime of The Ancient

52 AR, p. 166. 53 In taking this comment to be an effective statement of the symbolic achievement of The Ancient Mariner, I am consciously contradicting Elmer E. Stoll's famous response to certain symbolist readings: see "Symbolism in Coleridge," PMLA, 63 (1948), 221.

157 Mariner because Coleridge extends the technique of symbolic rever­ beration by boldly expanding the area of reference of the image. The imagery here is not built out of descriptive detail as in the conver­ sational mode, but out of action and event, in other words out of the largeness of human experience. It presents our 'inward nature' in bold, sweeping lines which may be said to dilate suggestion from specific to general, or archetypal, significance.

The power of archetypal imagery is one of the most striking features of The Ancient Mariner and it is one which must be reckoned with. 54 I am using the term 'archetypal' generally in this context without reference to any specific idea of a collective unconscious or of primitivism, but rather to denote something characteristically human and intrinsically of the nature of humanity. If you are an articulate human being with a fairly representative range of physical and mental experiences, there are certain tendencies of psychological behaviour which, when expressed by the nuances of imagery, will be recognised by you as meaningful and probably even important. Imagery which controls and directs these tendencies strikes resonance with man's most sponta­ neous and non-rational way of experiencing himself and it is likely to be apprehended with a certain kind of automatic pleasure and satisfac­ tion. This type of imagery does not operate by establishing correspon­ dencesor organizing precise referents; at its best it harnesses a reader's personal associations within a theme of general import, allow­ ing free play of a wide range of mental activity. By this method a

54 The standard discussion of archetypal imagery in The Ancient Mariner is in Maud Bodkin's Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934; rpt. London, 1968) where the poem is seen primarily in terms of the rebirth arche­ type (pp. 26-89).

158 concept of poetic value is developed which seems to approximate to

Coleridge's 'semblance of truth'. That 'willing suspension of dis­ belief' 55 which was the poet's aesthetic aim in this context, en­ courages a relaxation of the judging faculty, or Knights's 'recog­ nition that is also an affinnation'. And the state of suspension is induced because Coleridge selects images with reference to the opera­ tions of his unconscious as well as his conscious mental experience.

He evokes that 'affinnation' in the reader because he accurately recreates creating nature, where nature is the inward life at its most complex.56

The Ancient Mariner's archetypal imagery provides the means by which we appreciate the poem as the construction of a psychic event.

In 'Frost at Midnight' and other 'Conversation' poems, a structure is created around the poet himself as persona and the mental experience conveyed carries his direct authority. Without this authority, new depth of exploration is engineered in The Ancient Mariner because the poet as narrator remains completely uncharacterised. Coleridge's only reference to the speaker who provides the poem's tenuous objectivity was made in three early editions in the poem's subtitle, 'A Poet's

Reverie' (I, 186n). The narrator is thus understood to be a dreaming poet but as the poem proceeds, the dreamer gradually disappears; in fact Coleridge withdrew the subtitle after 1805, so making the dreamer nothing more than a technical device. The central experience is

55 BL, II, 6. 56 This idea forms the basis of Richard Haven's Patterns of Consciousness (op.cit.) which sets out to examine Coleridge's poetry and prose as the 'symbolic projection' of specific and recognizable kinds of ex­ perience (p. 17). In particular Haven explores The Ancient Mariner as a 'representation of the flux and reflux of inmost nature' (p.19); see pp. 18-42.

159 organised according to viewpoint and the viewpoint which is of parti­ cular concern is not that of the poet who created the mariner and his tale, nor even that of the poet/dreamer whose 'reverie' structures the course of events, but that of the mariner himself. It is the mariner's vision of his own experience which is the matter of the poem and it is his understanding of himself in experience which gives the poem its final significance.

Because it is a dream figure who dominates the poetic se- quence, there is no direct reference to the personal experience of the poet. 57 The technique of the poem is to build a world which creates its own terms and the reader is forced to relinquish the security of his own historical and domestic perspectives if he is to participate in the experience of the 'ancient mariner'. Coleridge manipulates the reader's involvement initially by means of the narrative framework. The opening presentation of the mariner and the wedding-guest in conversation, high- lights visual details of the mariner and sets the atmosphere, while subtly changing the focus of attention. The presence of the onlooker is maintained until the mariner's extraordinary power of command is firmly established. Then the poet/dreamer and the mariner finally merge as the action begins to move into a mariner-centred universe. Coleridge engineers the change in focus by presenting starkly the ship's departure from familiar surroundings, with ironic emphasis on the crew's naivety with regard to the future.

Merrily did we drop Below the kirk, below the hill, Below the lighthouse top. (I, 187)

57 For a discussion of the poem as personal allegory, see George Whalley, "The Mariner and the ," in Twentieth Century Views, pp. 32-50.

160 The implications of the new situation are introduced innnediately by the sudden personification of the sun, which serves to polarise the figure of the mariner as a living creature. This is a world impelled by its own internal motivation, by forces whose logic is unknown to the mariner and to all who sail with him. The dreamer's initial resistance to the surrender of the safe distance conferred by observation is evoked by the wedding-guest's repeated beating of his breast. The interruptions mitigate the magnetism of the narrative by halting its flow and reintro­ ducing momentarily the objective view. The tale continues irrevocably however; the narrator fades away as he is drawn into the dream situation with the mariner, and the reader's involvement is also demanded as the experience gains subjective intensity.

The world of the voyage is characterised by its relentless power of purposive movement; in contrast, the mariner's self-conscious volition and powers of choice are atrophied and he is left at the mercy of violent and uncontrollable mental experiences which are made accessible to him by the world he encounters. It is the achievement of the diction and the imagery that the reader gives his whole assent to the poetic process and willingly suspends his desire for logical sequence. He asks no questions. Not only has the poet's structural technique left no other course open to him than to identify with the mariner who accepts all as inevitable, but also the reader recognises the psychological ten­ dencies which are being enacted and is satisfied by the familiarity of the emotional context. The dominating 'reisemotif' is used with skill to isolate the psychological experience and it is one which Coleridge used several times with reference to mental states and suspended volition.58

58 See, for example, Notebooks, I, 932 and 1718.

161 In the Gutch Memorandum Book he makes a note about 'The limited sphere of mental activity in artist' 59 and some years later, depicts Wordsworth at his most creative, 'at the Helm of a noble Bark; now he sails right onward - it is all open Ocean, & a steady Breeze, and he drives before it ••. • 60 The isolation of a ship on the ocean conveys that state of initial attention wh~ch is conducive to interpenetration with natural forces, but the mind must be in a state of fertile openness to the essential impulses before its own positive activity is initiated.

The elemental world into which the ancient mariner moves is quickly shown to embody a different kind of psychological process from that of Wordsworth's creativity. It is a 'STORM-BLAST', 'tyrrannous and strong' which completely takes over the mariner's sense of purpose and forces him to drive like one 'pursued with yell and blow' into a strange and frightening land (I, 188). The atmosphere is created by tenseness, stillness and the play of light which intensifies the sense of unreality. Dominating the landscape are the massive forms of howling ice, bespeaking sterility and atrophe, with a distorting mist which prevents any clarity of vision. Over all is a 'dismal sheen' (I, 189).

This use of mist is very important throughout the poem as it is one of the means by which Coleridge reinforces the symbolism of mental experience and almost imperceptibly effects the transference of inner states to visible phenomena. In its translucent capacity of filtering light, mist becomes, as I have noted, part of that symbolic cluster which rep- resents the activity of imagination. 61 In excess, or as characterised by density and opaqueness, it is used to convey a frightening distortion

59 Noteoooks, I, 77. 60 Noteoooks, I, 1546. 61 Above, p. 153.

162 of conceptual thinking arising from the inability for productive re­ lationship between the mind and objects of perception.62 The link between these two uses may be seen from a note in which the poet is trying to clarify the satisfaction afforded him by organicism in defiance of necessity. His observation is basically that if he tries to discuss his thought processes (the 'mist' of his 'delving and difficulty' ) with a Pries tleian, he is answered with a 'stupid piece of mock-knowledge, having no root for then it would have feelings of dimness from growth, having no buds or twigs for then it would have yearnings and strivings of obscurity from growing ••. ' 63 Here the mist is unmistakeably associated with the 'dimness' and 'obscurity' which are attributable to the unconscious impulses of mental growth and thus finally to the impulses of the creative imagination. In another note the fluid, changing formation of a flock of starlings

'borne along like smoke, mist', is 'like a body unindued with voluntary

Power' • 64 The mist for Coleridge symbolises that mental activity by which the mind gradually recognises its own unconscious forces and when this activity is not controlled and organised in consciously directed processes, the result is some degree of psychological chaos.

It is curiously appropriate too, that a common eighteenth century meaning for the word 'rime' was a chill mist or hoar-frost, adding an

interesting extension to the significance of 'The Rime of the Ancient

Mariner'.

62 In his early notebooks Coleridge frequently associates mist with dis­ torted perception ('Dimness in sight to the eye, mist &c gives mag­ nitude', Notebooks, I, 1297), with emotional confusion ('misty medley, ..• a scattered mob of obscure feelings', Notebooks, I, 1599) and with lack of intellectual clarity (' •.. as far as I can see any­ thing in this total mist', Notebooks, I, 1770). 63 Notebooks, II, 2509. 64 Notebooks, I, 1589.

163 The instinctive rmconscious directives which are so vital

to creativity are thus felt to have overpowered the mind; the imagina-

tive process is grinding to a halt because the unconscious working over­

strenuously can only lead the mind to the grip of scle::rosis in which no

dialectical relationship, and therefore no interpenetration of any kind,

can take place. For the mariner no manifestation of life is available,

a fact which Coleridge re-emphasised when he published the prose gloss

to the 1817 edition. 65 In just sixty two lines of poetry the reader has been led to participate in the magnetic dramatisation of a terrifying mental condition, the desire for inaccessibility. R.D. Laing has given

an interpretation of this kind of mental experience in The Divided Self,66

and it is significant how often Laing's descriptive terminology reminds

us of the emotional or psychological context of The Ancient Mariner.

Consequent upon some often deep-rooted ontological insecurity a person may feel the need to widen the existential connection between himself

and the world, in which case he adopts a 'role' by means of which he

operates in his relations with others in order to protect his 'self'

or personal identity. 67 The 'self' then demands inaccessibility, re­

maining encapsulated in a secure self-created world of phantasy; 68 all

attempt to appeal to the humanity of the individual is felt as a threat.

It is just at the point in the poem when an inner phantasy world has

been vividly created both pictorially and emotionally, that Coleridge's

albatross penetrates the wastes of fog. It is a beautiful living

6 5 The place is described as a 'land of ice, and of fearful sounds where no living thing was to be seen.' (I, 189) 66 The Divided Self (1960; rpt. Harmondsworth, 1972). 67 I have already suggested that Coleridge applied a similar framework to the experience of the 'self'; see above Chapter 3, pp. 48-49. 68 The Divided Self, p. 138. One of Laing's patients describes the experience where, 'Everything •.• becomes unreal as soon as I approach.' (p. 146)

164 creature requiring all that a relationship demands - recognition, pro­ tection, self-submission and love. 69 In the context of the mariner's experience (and he significantly never relates directly to his ship­ mates), the albatross offers the final possibility of fruitful relation­ ship, evoking the conflicting emotions of hope and fear. Notably while the mariner accepts the challenge of communication (and the albatross responds daily to the 'mariner's hallo' - Coleridge's use of the apostrophe is interesting), 70 the ship is propelled in a beneficial direction out of the land of ice and snow. It never finally emerges from the mist. The mariner cannot extricate himself from the inner terror which alters his perception; the albatross perches 'in mist or cloud',

'on mast or shroud/ Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white/

Glimmered the white Moonshine' (I, 189). So, as Coleridge marvelously conveys in the narrative, the mariner is trapped; he has no alternative but to act, and to act violently and involuntarily. At the mercy of his own internal system which, through fear, demands an autistic identity, he shoots the albatross. And immediately the implications of the deed for the mariner are made apparent by an exact repetition of the earlier sinister personification of the sun as Part II begins.

The killing of the albatross is presented in deliberately existential terms and its social and religious consequences are given

69 D.W. Harding, in "The Theme of The Ancient Mariner," (loc.cit.), comments that in killing the albatross, the mariner destroys possible 'ties of affection' with the bird (p. 59), whose significance is that it 'mitigated the isolation' (p. 61). 7 0 In 1. 90 (the emphatic repetition of 1. 74: "Came to the mariner's hollo'), he alternated his use of the apostrophe four times, settling finally on the pJural sense; the loss of the albatross visibly affects the whole society of sailors. In assigning emphasis, it is important to note that Coleridge did not once consider the plural sense for 1 . 74 itself, where a sustained subjective viewpoint is crucial.

165 primarily as contributory to the build-up of the mariner's guilt. 71

His initial relief finds expression in the apparently benevolent land­ scape and the uncomplicated assent of his shipmates, but this state of affairs is transient and deceptive. The 'fair breeze' drives the ship to an extremity of isolation and alienation where it becomes lodged with the paralysing rigidity which is the necessary consequence of the denial of communication.

Day after day, day after day; We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean. (I, 191)

Sclerosis and unreality are now not only attributes of the landscape bu~they encroach upon the mariner's experience of himself. There is no possibility of mental development because the mariner is unresponsive to external stimuli. The whole scene is transformed by his deadening perception to reflect his internal condition. 72 The most important aspect of the mariner's psychological experience is his guilt at the denial of his humanity. In his vision he debases the living world, inc­ luding himself, into a state of stagnation and slow death with images of shrivelling, rotting and decaying. As he had denied the most purely human form of communication to both the albatross and the crew ('And we did speak only to break/The silence of the sea' [I, 190]), so every

tongue is now 'withered at the root' (I, 191). In particular, movement

71 Maintaining his view of the inadequacy of organicism as a model for mental growth, Stephen Prickett finds that the poem demonstrates a 'continual tension between the organic wholeness between man and nature that is desired, and the series of catastrophic breakdowns of this relationship by which the growth towards it oomes about.' ("The Living Educts," p. 103) I take this oomment as supporting a psychological reading of the poem more forcefully than supporting Prickett's own contention that 'The Mariner's rehabilitation is not described to us as "growth," but in simple uncompromising tenns of good and evil, guilt and expiation.'(ibid.) 72 Richard Haven also bases his reading on the fact that 'It is not the location which changes but the structure of the Mariner's experience.' (op.cit., p.20) He does not examine this experience from an existen­ tial viewpoint, however.

166 in the universe (the lights at night and the sun on the water) is seen by the paralysed mind as horrifying and evil. Then suddenly the ap­ proach of the spectre-bark prompts the mariner's major conscious action of the voyage, and its effect is to confirm his condition. The ghost­ ship is associated with the terrible single glare of the sun and its insubstantiality is horrifying to the mariner especially as this taints all it touches, even the sun itself: 'And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,/(Heaven's Mother send us grace!)' (I, 193) 73 The mariner now suffers an unendurable horror of impingement, being aware that he is the cause of his own fate. There is no doubt or surprise about the outcome of the dice-game, and the dreadful joy of the 'Nightmare Life­ in-Death' is completely appropriate even though she has supposedly won only one victim. Coleridge thus takes the mariner to the depths of psychic disintegration where he is fixed on the point of existential death but with some recognition of his own tragedy.

As the mariner's living death begins, Coleridge reinforces the hostile malevolence of the universe by intensifying the relationship between the personified forces and by deliberately creating a world of

frighteningly distorted perception in whose terms the mariner's central

core of guilt is to be understood. The impossible physical phenomenon

of the 'horned Moon, with one bright Star/Within the nether tip' (I, 196) was specifically chosen by Coleridge in preference to the earlier, more

realistic 'Almost between the tips' (I, 195n) , 74 indicating his desire

to provide a direct statement of the landscape's dependence on perception.

73 The ideas of insubstantiality, ribbing and imprisonment are subtly as- sociated, forming an important recurring motif in the poem: see the description of the mariner as like 'the ribbed sea-sand' (I, 196) and the comparisons between the sails and the skeleton-like leaves (below, p.175). 74 The genesis of this image is discussed by Lowes, op.cit., pp. 165-170 and 508n.

167 The mariner himself becomes the agent of cosmic bad luck emblemized by the 'star-dogged moon', and the relationship between self-denigra­ tion and the world of unreality is confirmed. For the reader the ex­ perience is harrowing because the poetic situation is so well controlled.

Including the episode with the spectre-bark and the marvelous lines painting the terrifying whiteness of the night, the creation of un­ reality, the 'super-natural', is cumulative and there is no credibility gap. It is quite typical of this psychological condition that every event is interpreted as related directly to the sufferer. 75 When the other mariners die, their souls are visible and relevant to the mariner's condition; the 'whizz' of the cross-bow indicates that it is guilt which denies the mariner the possibility of grace so that his final isolation is a spiritual one. The self-inflicted loneliness is so acute that the charity of the saints is ineffectual and even 'God himself/Scarce seemed there to be' (I, 208). Later in his life Coleridge mentioned in conversation this same state of mind, and in terms very similar to those given poetic treatment here; he says

I love but few, but those I love as my own Soul; for I feel that without them I should ••• by little and little become a soul-less fixed Star, receiving no rays nor influences into my Being, a Solitude which I so tremble at, that I cannot attribute it even to the Divine Nature. 76

In his own assessment now, the mariner is slime and his attempt to re­

gain his humanity is daunted at the outset because he is the cause of

his own paralytic inaccessibility. Of greatest consequence of all is

75 This point is made for instance, by Alan Stone in The Abnormal Personality Through Literature (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966), p.141. 76 Allsop, pp. 197-198. (Also CL, V, 240)

168 that having been for so long unable to receive, he is now unable to give. His deepest desires to pray are transformed to evil thoughts which beat in his head with a pounding rhythm that emphasises his im- prisonment.

In this way Coleridge powerfully dramatises in The Ancient

Mariner the encroachment and final state of alienation of the self from all that is not-self. 77 The extremity of the process is induced by a mysterious and instinctive failure of response over which volition and the conscious mind have no control. Similarly the salvation of the mariner is made possible by just such an inexplicable impulse from within, and this impulse is heralded by a slight, though extremely sig­ nificant change in perception. The mariner is suddenly able to notice without fear or horror, the beautiful movement of the moon and stars and for the first time,the autonomous life in nature is recognised by him in its own beauty, carrying no threat. The new note of lyricism in the ballad form conveys the change, and the moonlight's reminder of

Spring hoar-frost offers promise of hidden growth. Coleridge clearly wanted to emphasise the potential of the situation when he added the gloss, where he makes explicit how the mariner's 'Loneliness and fixed­ ness' are mitigated because he 'yearneth' towards the 'journeying' moon

(I, 197). 78 I have previously mentioned Coleridge's use of the verb

'to yearn' as conveying that impetus to growth in which one type of mental activity is absorbed and transformed into another. 79 The

77 Morse Peckham points the way to this kind of reading of The Ancient Mariner in his short introduction to the poem: : The Culture of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1965), p. 51. 78 It is Alice Chandler's thesis that motion, rather than the moon, is the symbol of life in the poem; see "Structure and Symbol in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," M-L.Q.26(1965), 407. 79 Above, Chapter III, p. 51.

169 mariner's yearning is therefore of great significance as an expression of the desire for reciprocation, even though he is himself still outside the influence of natural forces.

But where the ship's huge shadow lay The char~d water burnt alway A still and awful red. (I, 197)

Gradually and with increasing relaxation the mariner redevelops his creative perception. As he becomes responsive to the stimuli from the natural world, he finds himself coming alive again. At first he watches the water-snakes 'Beyond the shadow of the ship' and recognises their beauty and their life. Then 'Within the shadow of the ship/ I watched their rich attire' (I, 198). Their brilliant colours and sinuous motion captivate the mariner until he suddenly feels with them in their happiness and the spell is broken. His spontaneous imaginative identification with the snakes releases his mind from the grip of guilt (suggested by the fall of the albatross from his neck) and makes it possible for him to re-enter the world of dialectical relationships.

In The Road to Xanadu Lowes has documented in great detail the genesis of Coleridge's image of the water-snakes. 80 Source-tracing, however, largely by-passes the central significance of the snakes as objects of the mariner's empathy. J.B. Beer has pointed out Coleridge's

familiarity with the mythology of the serpent and commented on its rele­ vance here. 81 It is especially significant that laterin his life

Coleridge himself made reference to the serpent as typifying the Egyptian

symbol of the understanding, as the 'discursive and logical faculty

8 0 op.c1.t.,, pp. 39-57. 81 Coleridge the Visionary (1959; rpt. London 1970), pp. 156-157.

170 possessed individually by each individual' •82 While this faculty when given precedence, may become the 'sophistic principle, the wily tempter to evil ••• prevailing on the WILL ••• against the command of the Universal

Reason' , 83 it nevertheless is an indispensible component of the intellect which attains to wisdom. As an epigraph to Coleridge the Visionary,

John Beer quotes from Hazlitt's entry in the London Magazine in 1820 of a 'typical sample of Coleridge's conversation':

The principle of the imagination resembles the emblem of the serpent, by which the ancients typified wisdom and the universe, with undulating folds, for ever varying and for ever flowing into itself, - circular and without beginning or end.

The sinuous quality of the water-snakes is similarly suggestive of

Coleridge's concept of the imagination. In the Biographia he makes a direct comparison between the undulating motions of the poetic imagina­ tion, pausing, receding, and driving forward, with the serpent or

Egyptian symbol of the intellect (II, 11). I have previously stressed the important contribution of the conscious understanding to imaginative activity, and in The Ancient Mariner the fact that it is water-snakes by which the mariner is rescued from his predicament, contributes to the subtle evocation of the mariner's state of suspended volition. The experience of empathy with the serpentine activity of the snakes offers him the possibility for a new imaginative reconstruction of the universe.

It thereby promotes the natural psychological tendency for growth to form

and rescuesthe mariner from his own internal chaos.

82 AR, p. 171n. 83 ibid. Coleridge seems to have used the serpent poetically in this way in Christabel, where Christabel's spontaneous responses are strangled by the reptilian Geraldine (most obviously in Bard Bracy's dream: PW, I, 232) until Christabel herself becomes serpentine.

171 We immediately understand the enormous strain which the mariner's mental sclerosis has sustained because we are in empathy with him in the sudden relaxation of both mental and physical tensions, an empathy effected by the powerful symbols of sleep and rain. In three short stanzas Coleridge not only harnesses full poetic and psychological energy into these symbols but he manipulates them to stress the mariner's blissful, unconditional acceptance of natural functions. The sleep

'slid' into his soul, and the rain, initiated by his dreams, is received into his body like the sacrament. Coleridge's achievement in this poem is two-fold, however. He not only recreates a release from the living hell of existential catatonia but he also conveys the consequences of this kind of experience to those who have known it. The mariner's return to familiar surroundings is harrowing and fraught with difficulties. He experiences initially a euphoric reaction to his imprisonment in which he finds himself in the middle of a vast and violent activity of the elements. Yet he feels himself to be weightless and he remains unmoved by the 'coming wind', which 'roared more loud'. The creative force is in evidence, but it 'did not come anear' and, in fact, 'never reached the ship' (I, 199). The mariner even recognises that the sails of the ship,

'that were so thin and sere', have a quality of the spectre-bark about them. 84 Following the reawakening of his awareness of creative nature, the mariner has to understand the extent of his own inability to partici­ pate in social relations. As the angelic troop works the ship in the bodies of the dead mariners, he is made to face the effects of his ter­

rible experience and the fact that he can never again live in the world of men as he has done before.

84 In the 1798 edition, the mariner himself is described as having taken on some of the qualities of the world he has known: 'Thought I, I am as thin as air, I They cannot me behold.' (PW, I, 201n)

172 The body of my brother's son Stood by me, knee to knee: The body and I pulled at one rope, But he said nought to me. (I, 200)

Again Coleridge emphasises the mariner's inability to communicate and in the early edition made this quite overt: 'And I quaked to think of my own voice/ How frightful it would be!' (I, 200n) For this protagonist, however, there is to be a return to the world of normality, if not a complete reconciliation with it. The visible sounds of the troop of blessed spirits evoke the memory of universal harmony in nature, where

the song of skylarks fills the sea and air, and the rippling of the brook is echoed by the woods. The mariner, however, must not simply long for future peace with nature; he must first reach self-knowledge by under­ standing and integrating his past experience fully. Coleridge depicts

this process rather crudely by the technique of internal dialogue. The mariner explains:

But ere my living life returned I heard and in my soul discerned Two voices in the air. (I, 202)

One is the voice of self-criticism, the spokesman of the guilt still

active in the presence of the Polar Spirit ('Is this the man?/ ••• With

his cruel bow he laid full low/ The harmless Albatross' [I, 202]).

'The other was a softer voice' which promotes self-acceptance and it is

this voice which makes overt for the mariner the link between his mental

activity and his progress ('For slow and slow that ship will go,/ When

the mariner's trance is abated.' [I, 203]).

Thus the mariner's self-awareness increases and because of the

reader's total identification with the sequence of events, he experiences

the work itself as exhibiting an organic development. The poem has un-

173 folded in symbols which have combined to recreate the gradually intensi­ fying processes of consciousness by virtue of their communication of numinous and pre-conscious power. Gradually, now, the supernatural inter­ vention is withdrawn and the mariner's new state is more clearly defined.

The nightmare world can still inflict its spell on him ('All fixed on me their stony eyes,/ That in the Moon did glitter' [I, 203]) and momentari­ ly he cannot pray, but he can force himself to break the spell and he looks out to the ocean, recognising himself for what he is. He knows now that he does not see as others do; that he must go through life with the memory of his experience always with him and its recurrence ever possible for him:

Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, Because he knows, a fearful fiend Doth close behind him tread. (I, 203)

The mariner accepts his fate and so fulfils the prerequisite for his return home. A wind gets up and blows on him alone 'Like a meadow-gale of Spring'. It strikes a strange fear in him as he anticipates the re­ adoption of his role in the world, 'Yet it felt like a welcoming' (I, 204).

So the mariner reaches the threshhold of the old familiar scenes still impelled by the non-rational elements of his personality.

Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed The light-house top I see? Is this the hill? is this the kirk? (I, 204)

The reversal of kirk, hill and light-house top from the earlier stanza

(I, 187) clearly conveys the mariner's re-entry into the world he inhabi­ ted at the beginning of the voyage, but there is no question here that he is now at the point from which he started. The upward progression of the

'eddy' structure has added a new dimension to the mariner's, and the

lM reader's, mental experience so that the poem itself has taken on the spiral shape of imaginative wisdom exemplified in the water-snakes.

At this point the mariner meets the vanguard of the society to which he is to relate. Coleridge then opens out the viewpoint of the poem and allows us to see the reactions of the Hermit, the Pilot and his boy to the strangeness of the mariner. The mariner grasps im­ mediately the hope that the Hermit can shrieve him and help to alleviate his sense of guilt, but, and this has been missed by commentators, 85 the shrieving does not take place. In fact the Hermit's power is nullified by the intensity of the mariner's need to relive the experience.

Coleridge suggests that the kind of Christianity practised by the Hermit does not penetrate to inner 'reality' such as the mariner has known. It has nothing with which to aid him; in fact it is deceptive in the facade of comfort which it, in the presence of the Hermit, seems to offer him, even as the Hermit's 'cushion plump' is 'the moss that wholly hides/ The rotted old oak stump' (I, 206). The Hermit's words emphasise that the mariner is to be alone in his new knowledge. Coleridge reminds us again how the ship has become insubstantial like the skeleton world of prey and death in which the mariner has played a part. The sails are compared to:

Brown skeletons of leaves that lag My forest-brook along; When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow, And the owlet whoops to the wolf below, That eats the she-wolf's young. (I, 206-207)

The hermit's world of nature provides the parallel but cannot ease the mariner's psychological and spiritual pain.

85 As, for example, by R.L. Brett, op.cit., p. 98.

175 When the old mariner finally makes his contact with the three men from the land, he experiences a tumultuous wrench from the nightlnare world, conveyed by the sinking of the ship. He clearly bears the scars of his ordeal and his appearance strikes terror in the men. He has, however, come to terms with himself and can summon his resources with conscious determination. 'I took the oars' (I, 207); the words accost us with force. Here again the mariner acts, now directing and propelling the course of his life with strength of purpose. He is never to be free of the consequences of his ordeal, amongst which are the need to relive the experience and demand empathy, and the attainment of a new wisdom with respect to universal life. Coleridge has him compress this wisdom into a didactic moral statement which some commentators have taken to summarise the whole import of the poem:

He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all. (I, 209)

In his famous reply to Mrs. Barbauld, Coleridge gave as his opinion that

the poem had 'too much' moral and that it ought to have no more moral principle of action than had the geni in the Arabian Nights, who declared he must kill a merchant because he had inadvertantly injured the geni's

son with a date shell. 86 The achievement of the whole context of the poem is to minimise the relevance of the chain of cause and effect be­

cause, in Coleridge's terms, the poem is a 'work of such pure imagination•,87

86 TT, May 31, 1830. 87 ibid.

176 or in other words, the representation of an imaginative experience. 88

It is the palpable amorality of the world of the voyage that makes

it so terrifying and it is in the context of this world that

Coleridge felt his moralising to be too intrusive. Certainly the 'moral' verses have a philosophical significance which is born out by some of

the events in the poem; Coleridge's theory of the 'One Life' is ex­ pressed in them, but it is organized to relate most forcibly to prayer:

Farewell, Farewell! But this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! He prayeth well, who loveth well, Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small ••• (I, 209)

The over-riding personal significance for the mariner lies in main­

taining the power to communicate and, in the final analysis, to commu­ nicate with God by giving freely something of his inmost self.

The poem closes leaving the reader moved and mentally exhaus­

ted. The objective viewpoint returns for only about thirty lines when we witness the festivities of the wedding-guests and realign ourselves

with the poet/dreamer as he describes the departure of the mariner and

the changed and saddened outlook of the wedding-guest. The tone developed

in the final lines of the poem suggests that the dreamer's identification

with the mariner throughout his ordeal has had an effect on him similar

88 Coleridge expressed a similar attitude to his poem 'The Raven' written about the same time as The Ancient Mariner. To this poem he added a moral for the 1817 edition of Sibylline Leaves, but made the rather scathing manuscript note: Added thro' cowardly fear of the Goody! What a Hollow, where the Heart of Faith ought to be, does it not betray? this alarm concerning Christian morality, that will not permit even a Raven to be a Raven, nor a Fox a Fox •.. (I, 171) Interestingly this poem was referred to by Lamb as Coleridge's 'Dream' (I, 169n), suggesting that it too is something in the nature of a 'poet's reverie~concerned with matters to which external criteria of morality are largely irrelevant.

177 to that on the wedding-guest, his counter-part; all, listener, dreamer and reader, are made sadder, wiser and 'of sense forlorn' by the ex- perience of the poem. The symbolic mode of The Ancient Mariner offers such a wide range of suggestion through its organization of the relation­ ship of objects and actions to each other that it effectively sustains the involvement of the reader promoted by the structure.

The reading of the poem as a psychic event is based on the broad directions of interpretation offered by the imagery and conse- quently, more precise allegorical interpretations limit the poem's power of appeal. To this extent I must agree with criticisms of R.P. Warren's reading of the poem as depending on a 'rigid and consistent pattern of meaning' 89 or as needing a 'less rigid theory of symbolic reference•. 90

Humphrey House describes very clearly the way in which Coleridge created images to evoke psychological tendencies rather than to give direct rep- resentation of specific phenomena:

Such images were used for creativeness both of a wider and more specially poetic kind; but they were also used for much else, especially in conjunction with the subtler processes of the mind and the more delicate modes of feeling. They were used especially for the mysteries and uncertainties of the mental life which Coleridge was beginning to explore more fully ••• 91

Coleridge's skill as a poet is evident in his control of the range of sug­

gestion within which he works. He presents the reader with an experience

of a mind actually growing towards a new self-realization and the poem's

greatness lies in its establishing a specific mental landscape with power

89 E.E. Bostetter, op.cit., p. 65. 90 House, p. 110. Warren gives his reply to these and other criticisms, Warren, pp. 280-289. 9 l House, p. 112.

178 and verisimilitude. The poetry is not marred by random affective ten-

dencies because the poet's technical organization of structure and verse technique holds intellectual and emotional issues in a tight

form. This is the operation of Coleridge's 'esemplastic power', the

unity of the many in one. In 180 3 he made a note explaining how the

'many' are unified in this way:

It is the co-presence of Feeling and Life, limit­ less by their very essence, with Form, by its very essence limited - detenninate - definite92

Poetry of psychological process at its best provides perfect reconcili­

ation of these opposing concepts.

One final point which I feel should be made about The Ancient

Mariner and thus about Coleridge's practical aesthetic, concerns its

relevance to life as a whole and consequently to its value as a poem.

E.E. Bostetter in his recent essay has polarised two views of the poem,

one which makes it a poem of meaningful moral relevance and one which

sees it as giving the 'illusion of inevitable sequence to superb incon­

sequence'.93 Apparently those who read the poem as a dream (as Lowes)

deny the validity of its moral content outside the context of the poem

since 'the magical world and its values are contradicted by all our know-

1 e d ge an d experience.. ' gi. Those who, like Warren, argue for the poem's

relevance as presenting the sacramental theme of the 'One Life', have

to ignore many of its structural attributes. Bostetter claims, as I

92 Notebooks, I, 1561. 9 3 Bostetter, p. 72.

gi. ibid.

179 have done, that the substance of the poem is 'The Nightmare World of

The Ancient Mariner' but when he comes to the issue of relevance, he

finds the poem to be an 'expression of complex attitudes' which may

'contradict the poet's formal philosophy' and 'which may not be rationally defensible', so that the 'Rime' is not in any way morally meaning. f u.1 95 To me, however, this is not a poem of 'attitudes' but a poem of experience. The attitudes embodied in the mariner's ordeal are, I agree, largely in contradiction to those summarised in the moral but, as I have outlined, the very nature of their embodiment is such as to fix their relevance to the reader forever in his consciousness.

Coleridge once wrote of one of his own nightmares: 'O it was a wild dream, yet a deal of true Psychological Feeling at the bottom of it'. 96 Furthermore, not long before writing The Ancient Mariner he described Charles Lloyd's bouts of mental illness in the following

terms:

He falls at once into a kind of Night-mair: and all the Realities round him mingle with, and form a part of, the strange Dream. All his voluntary powers are suspended; but he perceives every thing & hears every thing, and whatever he perceives & hears he perverts into the substance of his delerious vision. 97

The Ancient Mariner is an existential drama of just such a man at the mercy of his own defective will. It is a re-enactment of the discovery,

and recovery, of the self in its purest form of subjectivity, in its

alienation from all that is not-self. In this it presents the anti­

thetical experience to 'Frost at Midnight' which dramatises the highest

95 Bostetter, pp.72 and 77. 96 Notebooks, I, 1824. 97 CL, I, 257.

180 form of imaginative communion with 'other', giving access to God as the archetype of the unified self. The Rime of The Ancient Mariner on the other hand, presents us with phantasy; it is a dream, a vision, but one of specifically human relevance, recreating human experience, and in its veracity lies its power.

181 CHAPTER VII ORGANIC POETRY: A SUMMARY Psychological processes provide the substance and the struc­ ture of much of Coleridge's work as a poet and, as poems as different as 'Frost at Midnight' and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner demonstrate, the poetry thus epitomises the art of organic form. It is interesting that Coleridge's concern with psychological development is so much in evidence at a time when he was theoretically least clear about the nature of mental functions. It seems that he was instinctively a poet of the mind long before he was a philosopher of art, and that he developed a symbolic mode of his own before he sought any definition of the concept of the symbol. A lot of Coleridge's best poetry, notably 'This Lime-Tree

Bower My Prison', 'Kubla Khan', 'Dejection: an Ode' and 'To William

Wordsworth' in addition to that which I have examined, achieves its effects by creating a nexus of symbols, each bringing its own form of vitality and suggestion, into a primary image of the process of thought. Coleridge structures the release of unconscious forces in the mind of the poet/ persona in the poem, and communicates with similar unconscious patterns in the reader. In this way he powerfully recreates emotional and noetic states by the interrelationship of symbols.

The nodal function of the symbol is crucial to this kind of poetry and although Coleridge did not attempt an articulate account of the symbolic process, he did make some interesting related references when he was working actively as a poet. Towards the end of 1796 he made a strangely evocative note in one of his notebooks:

0 man, thou half-dead Angel - a dusky light -a purple flash crystalline splendour -light blue Green lightnings. - in that eternal and & delirious misery wrathfires -

182 inward desolations an horror of great darkness great things that on the ocean counterfeit infinity - 1

This passage is frequently quoted, though usually without further comment. 2

In the light of the poet's later writing, it may in fact be seen to sug­ gest unarticulated feelings about the relationship between mental states and symbols of the phenomenal world, where the symbol's power of communi­ cating the infinite is in question. The full stop in the fourth line divides the evocations of light from those of darkness and separates the positive inspirational qualities of man (the 'half-dead Angel') suggested by the blue section of the spectrum, from the horrors of consuming redness and alienation. The emphasis on 'Green lightnings' stresses its important centrality in the progression from violet to red and sharply conveys the lurid point of transition from the receding darkness of dusk to the ap­ proaching darkness of Hell. It is interesting that Coleridge uses the terms 'dusky' and 'crystalline' in the first half, bringing to mind the misty filtering of light and the symbolic translucence which he later as- sociates directly with the activity of reason in imagination. The flash and lightning confirm suggestions of a sudden release of inspiration. In this passage, however, the inspiration is overpowering and unstructured, resulting in the state of delirium and desolation characteristic of a mental process in which there is no conscious participation. The 'half­ dead Angel' has glimpsed the reality of infinity but his final experience is of the horror of negation and he is left with only a counterfeit truth. 3

1 Notebooks, I, 273. 2 As, for example, by Patricia Ward, "Coleridge's Critical Theory of the Symbol," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 8, 26. 3 It is also interesting that the horrific aspects of the wrathfires and the red end of the spectrum are located 'on the ocean'. Taken with the suggestions of the defective will, they are reminiscent of the early part of The Ancient Mariner (PW, I, 190-191).

183 Coleridge's second reference to 'counterfeit infinity' made just under a year later, supports the proposition that for Coleridge an apprehension of that quality of the infinite transmitted by the symbol requires a special kind of mental experience. The mind must experience a form of belief initiated by the strength of the experience itself.

Such a belief cannot be consciously motivated and it must involve the whole range of mental functions in order to produce a total affirmation of the power of the symbol. At this early stage in his thinking

Coleridge is not concerned with the symbolic nature of art, but with nature:

I can at times feel strongly, the beauties, you describe, in themselves, & for themselves -but more frequently all things appear little- ••• the uni verse itself - what but an immense heap of little things? - I can contemplate nothing but parts, & parts are all little - !- My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great -- something one & indivisible - and it is only in the faith of this that rocks or water­ falls, mountains or caverns give me the sense of sublimity or majesty! - But in this faith all things counterfeit infinity! 4

While the mind is aching for affirmation and a rational appreciation of the universe is in dominance, mountains, waterfalls and caverns cannot effect symbolic transformation. 5 Imaginative identification is promoted by relaxed interpenetration of mind and symbol occurring as the climax of a process of growth in which the truth affirmed needs no verification beyond the experience.

4 CL, I, 349. 5 This passage, and its relationship to the earlier one, are read quite differently by Albert Gerard, in a way which I cannot support in view of the specific use of the term 'counterfeit'. Gerard sees the two passages as 'antipodal', the reversal being accounted for by Coleridge's having reconciled his intuition of nature with Christian transcendentalism: see "Counterfeit Infinity: Coleridge and the Symbol," English Romantic Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), pp. 54-55.

184 Interpreting natural symbols in this way, and manipulating them contextually to recreate unfolding mental processes, Coleridge came to write 'organic' poetry. He did not, however, structure or clearly organise his vision of mental growth and was consequently never able to to examine it systematically nor to test it against a more objective interpretation of experience. For him organicism was to be­ come simply a way of looking at life, and to the extent that he was unable to cultivate any other consistent viewpoint as a viable alter­ native, he was confined within the limitations of a single theory.

This theory was, nevertheless, rewarding in its provision of the ap- paratus for an appreciation of the subtle relationship between life and art. Coleridge's almost visual conception of growth to form supported a fine perception of the possibility of uniting the paradoxical elements of commotion and structure, animate and inanimate, life and death. The power of Coleridge's symbol lies in its containment of the delicate re­ lationship between mental experience and poetic form so that without sur- rendering any of its own contextual autonomy, the symbol promotes a special kind of satisfaction when apprehended. The main problems with the aesthetics of organism occur when we come to consider its application to the evolution of the artefact as a complete structure. In this

Coleridge's help is not direct or specific. Rene Wellek, in his asses­ sment of Coleridge's importance as philosopher and critic, has justly observed that the poet rarely drew the consequences from his insights and never applied his theory of the symbol to the development of a well ordered aesthetic.6 As a result there have been many variant interpretations of the practical uses of Coleridge's theory and espe­ cially of his suggestion of assessing value in art against a criterion of 'organic regularity'. One of his comments on Shakespeare's genius gives a good indication of the kind of insight to which he was led by

6 • op.cit., p. 176.

185 the philosophy.

There is a law which all poets obey, conforming them­ selves to the outward symbols and manifestations of the essential principle. If we look to the growth of trees .•• we shall observe that trees of the same kind vary considerably, according to the circumstances of soil, air, or position; yet we are able to decide at once whether they are oaks, elms or poplars. S~ with Shakespeare's characters: he shows us the life prin­ ciple of each being with organic regularity. 7

In this passage the weight of a whole theory of art is placed upon the resolution of the opposing qualities of the oxymoron. In life, the growth of natural organisms is always irregular, though patently defin­ able. Only in art can we apprehend 'organic regularity' or the controlled evolution of a symbolic structure manifesting the essential principle of the organic life of the mind.

In this discussion I have argued that the specific nature of

Coleridge's symbol is crucial to his aesthetic organicism. The symbol's power of unification is its characteristic feature, yet amongst recent evaluations of this there are those which are argued from a mistaken view of Coleridge's balance of emphasis. Mary Rahme for example, centres a discussion on the 'symbol as process 18 and Patricia Ward, in her article, makes the distinction between allegory and symbol with the comment that the one is I too consciously a literary device while the other is an un- conscious• th'ing. I 9 Taking, on the other hand, the purely objective view- point (a viewpoint which it is, of course, impossible to put into practice),

Owen Barfield has suggested that the whole idea of organic art is mis-

7 SC, II, 131. 8 op.cit., pp. 626-627. 9 Op.cit. I p. 28.

186 leading because the 'image' itself is lifeless. 10 This comment raises again the issue which I have already mentioned with respect to psycho­ logy, that is the way in which Coleridge applied the organic theory. I have suggested that he consistently used organicism descriptively rather

than analogically of mental processes, but of poetry and art his thinking is more obviously metaphorical. Problems have been found with the philo­ sophy when it is assumed that Coleridge applied it literally to the evolu-

tion of art forms.

In a recent essay, 11 Harold Bloom emphasises the shortcomings of organicism as displaying a 'pragmatic neglect of the processes by which poems have to be produced' (p. 265). To Bloom, therefore, the theory does more harm than good because it 'obviates the poet's necessity not just to unfold like a natural growth'. It is interesting that some time ago the same interpretation was put upon Coleridge's thinking but with a completely different conclusion. Gordon McKenzie in his study of 'Organic Unity in

Coleridge' 12 enumerates the attributes of aesthetic organicism, noting especially its spontaneity, from which he extrapolates: 'The scientist or

artist who organizes the material is a mere agent.' (p. 37) McKenzie, however, declares himself in support of such 'blind' creativity; the

artist writes by necessity because the 'material itself seems to demand

a certain sort of structure, to be apart from ••• personal desires and prejudices.' (p. 39) I believe it to be quite erroneous to apply either

of these interpretations to Coleridge's conception of the creative work

10 Barfield, p. 44.

11 "Coleridge: The Anxiety of Influence," in New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, ed. G.H. Hartman (London, 1972), pp. 247-267. 12 op.cit.

187 of the organic mind. I have pointed out the clarity with which he describes the function of judgment, volition and attention in the evolution of the art form and there emerges from his own use of the theory, a distinct awareness that the artist is throughout, willingly and consciously in control of his material. As I have noted, when analysing poetry Coleridge frequently finds himself talking about the poet rather than the poem. 13 But when he .is specifically trying to evaluate the qualities of the art work in terms of organicism, he is rather more likely to focus on it as an experience apprehended by a reader or spectator. This tendency is evident, for example, in the above quotation about Shakespeare's 'organic regularity' (p. 186).

There is a viable distinction between the conception of a work of art simply and blindly growing to completeness, and that of its being ex­ perienced as an embodiment of growth by a spectator. As I have tried to demonstrate earlier, Coleridge's organicism does not obviate the opportunity for rational calculation in structure, theme or correction; neither does its spontaneous quality, in Coleridge's emphasis, demand that the artist should be a 'mere agent' in the act of creation. It demands rather that this should~ to be his role, as experienced by the spectator. In this we see the metaphorical, and admittedly some­ what limited, way in which Coleridge applied the theory to art.

Norman Fruman has rather flippantly dismissed this organic philosophy without making any attempt to assess its value or useful­ ness.14 One thing which the theory offers is a structured account of

13 Above Chapter I , p. 6 • 14 op.cit., pp. 191-193.

188 the way a work of art can achieve the transformation of variety to wiity so as to produce a profowid sense of satisfaction and pleasure in the spectator. Coleridge explains this effect in an essay on Dante •

•.• where parts preserve any distinct individuality, there simple beauty, or beauty simply, arises; but where the parts melt widistinguished into the whole, th ere maJest1.c. . b eauty, or maJes. t y, 1.s . the res ult· • 15

This kind of relationship of parts to a whole in the aesthetic context provides the rationale behind Coleridge's contention that 'nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so and not otherwise. 116 W.K. Wimsatt has, I think, oversimplified the relation of the organic life of the poem to the spectator in his recent thoughtful article on the organic metaphor. 17 He comments that in poetry we may recognise the beauty or significance of the detail long before we feel the power of the whole (exactly as Coleridge recog- nizes above), and that to remove one part or substitute another, may not radically damage the complete structure. But this view, while obviously true to some extent, does not take account of Coleridge's emphasis on the poem as a total experience to which all aspects of the work contribute imperceptibly. Coleridge describes this experience as a 'feeling in which the several thousand distinct impressions lose themselves as in a univer­ sal solvent' 18 or, again, as a 'total impression of infinity; the whole­ ness ••• not in a vision or conception, but in an inner feeling of totality, and absolute being.' 19 Where parts are removed or exchanged, therefore,

15 Miscellanies, p. 142. 16 BL, II, 9. 17 "Organic Form: Some Questions about a Metaphor," in Organic Form, ed. G.S. Rousseau (London, 1972), pp. 62-81. 18 Miscellanies, p. 142. In the Biographia also, Coleridge stresses the mutual dependence of parts in a harmonious whole: see BL, II, 10. 19 Miscellanies, p. 145.

189 the nature of the whole must be substantially altered; whether the result is to damage or improve, the artefact, as apprehended, conveys why it is so and not otherwise. 20

Wimsatt's argument does not sufficiently consider that specialised combination of emotional and intellectual responses which is the product of a unified work of art, especially a work of poetry.

Interestingly Yeats, in his short discussion of poetic symbolism, ex­ presses the Coleridgean notions freshly with respect to his own experience •

••• when sound, and colour, and fonn are in a musical relation, a beautiful relation to one another, they become, as it were, one sound, one colour, one form, and evoke an emotion that is made out of their distinct evocations and yet is one emotion. 21

The way in which this coalescence of poetic qualities takes place in the reader, is described by Coleridge as a process of organic growth and his own poetry owes its character and power to his vizualisation of the growth of the mind. But Coleridge's (like Yeats's) is a very personal aesthetic which is immediately appropriate only to poetry written to a certain kind of psychological formula. Growth in the poem considered as an autonomous unit, can be related to its aesthetic value only when the poetic reference is finally to mental experience. Within this context, however, Coleridge was able to develop a philosophical vision which offered him an outlet for his particular genius.

20 This argument would not be conceded by Norman Fruman who treats the subject contemptuously (op.cit., p. 191). 21 op.cit., p. 157.

190 SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY SECTION 1; Books

Abrams, Meyer H., ed. English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. [1st pub. 1960] [Especially essays by George McLean Harper and W.K. Wimsatt]

Abrams, Meyer H. The Milk of Paradise: The Effect of Opium Visions on the Works of DeQuincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson and Coleridge. Boston: Harvard Univer­ sity Press, 1934.

Abrams , Meyer H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Roma.ntic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.

Adair, Patricia M. The Waking Dream: A Study of Coleridge's Poetry. London: E. Arnold, 1967.

Appleyard, J.A. Coleridge's Philosophy of Literature: The Develop­ ment of a Concept of Poetry, 1791-1819. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1965.

Ball, Patricia M. The Central Self: A Study in Romantic and Victorian Ima.gination. London: Athlone Press, 1968.

Baker, James V. The Sacred River: Coleridge's Theory of the Imagi­ nation. With an introduction by Richard H. Fogle. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957

Barbour, Judith. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Theory and Poetry of the Self. Unpublished M.A. Thesis. Sydney Uni­ versity, 1969.

Barfield, Owen. What Coleridge Thought. London: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Bate, Walter J. Coleridge. Masters of World Literature series. New York: Macmillan, 1968.

191 Beebe, Maurice, ed. Literary Symbolism: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Literature. San Francisco: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1960.

Beer, John B., ed. Coleridge's Variety. London: Macmillan, 1974.

Beer, John B. Coleridge the Visionary. London: Chatto and Windus, 1970. [1st pub. 1959]

Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. New York: Doubleday, 1961.

Bodkin, Maud. Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination. London: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 1968. [1st pub. 1934]

Brett, R.L. Reason and Imagination: A Study of Form and Meaning in Four Poems. London: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 1960.

Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. Revised edition, abridged by the author. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. [1st pub. 1957]

Byatt, A.S. Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time. London: Nelson and Sons, 1970.

Coburn, Kathleen, ed. Coleridge: A Collection of Critical Essays. Twentieth Century Views series. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1967.

Coburn, Kathleen. The Self-Conscious Imagination: A Study of Coleridge's Notebooks in Celebration of the Bi-centenary of his Birth, 21 October 1772. London: Oxford University Press, 1974.

192 Coveney, Peter. The Image of Childhood: The Individual and Society; A Study of the Theme in English Litera­ ture. Revised edition with an introduction by F.R. Leavis. Hannondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1967. [1st pub. 1957]

Eliot, T.S. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in . London: Faber and Faber, 1970. [1st pub. 1933]

Ehrenzweig, Anton. The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of the Artistic Imagination. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967.

Fogle, Richard H. The Idea of Coleridge's Criticism. Perspectives in Criticism, vol. 9. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962.

Fordham, Frieda. An Introduction to Jung's Psychology. Hannonds­ worth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972. [1st pub. 1953]

Fruman, Norman. Coleridge: The Da.maged Archangel. London: Allen and Unwin, 1972. [1st pub. 1971]

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957.

Gerard, Albert S. English Romantic Poetry: Ethos, Structure and Symbol in Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968.

Grant, Allan. A Preface to Coleridge. Preface Books. London: Longman Group, 1972.

Hartley, David. Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations. 2 vols. 1749. Facsimile rep­ roduction (2 vols. in 1) edited with an intro-

193 auction by Theodore L. Huguelet. Gainsville, Florida; Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1966.

Hartman, Geoffrey H. New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth: Selected Papers from the English Institute. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972. [Especially essays by Harold Bloom, Thomas McFarland and Angus Fletcher]

Haven, Richard. Patterns of Consciousness: An Essay on Coleridge. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1969.

Hayter, Alethea. Opium and the Romantic Imagination. London: Faber and Faber, 1968.

House, Humphrey. Coleridge: The Clark Lectures 1951-1952. London: Hart-Davis, 1953.

Humphries, A. R. The Augustan World: Society, Thought and Letters in Eighteenth Century England. Harper Torchbooks. New York: Harper and Row, 1963. [1st pub. 1954]

Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. Harrnondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1971. [1st pub. 1959: The Doors of Perception 1st pub. 1954]

Jackson, J.R.de J. Method and Imagination in Coleridge's Criticism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.

James, D.G. Scepticism and Poetry: An Essay on the Poetic Imagination. London: Allen and Unwin, 1960. [1st pub. 1937]

Jung, C.G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, edited by Herbert Read et.al., vol. 9 part 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959.

194 Jung, C.G. et.al. Man and his Symbols. London: Aldus Books, 1964.

Kennode, Frank. Romantic Image. Fontana Library edition. London: Collins, 1971. [1st pub. 1957]

Knight, George Wilson. The Starlit Dome: Studies in the Poetry of Vision. London: Oxford University Press, 1971. [1st pub. 1941]

Knights, L.C. and Metaphor and Symbol: Proceedings of the Twelfth Cottle, Basil, eds. Symposium of the Colston Research Society Held in the University of Brist:ol, March 28th-March 31st 1960. London: Butterworth, 1960.

Laing, R. D. The Divided Self. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972. [1st pub. 1960]

Laing, R.D. The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1973. [1st pub. 1967]

Langbaum, Robert. The Poetry of Experience: The Drama.tic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition. The Norton Library edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963. [1st pub. 1957]

Langer, Suzanne K. Philosophy in a New Key. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1942.

Lowes, John Livingstone. The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination. Revised edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964. [1st pub. 1927]

Maritain, Jacques. Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. London: Harville Press, 1954.

Mason, Stephen F. Main Currents of Scientific Thought: A History of the Sciences. New York: Abelard - Schuman, 1956.

195 Matthiessen, f.O. The Ox£ord Book 0£ Arneri can Verse. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. [1st pub. 1950]

McKenzie, Gordon. Organic Unity in Coleridge. University of California Publications in English, vol. 8. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1937.

Milner, Marion. The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a Psychoanalytic Treatment. International Psychoanalytic Library, no. 76. London: Hogarth Press, 1969.

McFarland, Thomas. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.

Muirhead, H.J. Coleridge as Philosopher. London: Allen and Unwin, 1930.

Neumann, Erich. Art and the Creative Unconscious. Translated by Ralph Manheim. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959.

Peckham, Morse, ed. Romanticism: The Culture of the Nineteenth Century. New York: George Braziller, 1965.

Piper, Herbert W. The Active Uni verse: Pantheism and the Concept of Imagination in the English Romantic Poets. London: University of London Athlone Press, 1962.

Prickett, Stephen E. Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Rader, Melvin. Wordsworth: A Philosophical Approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.

Read, Herbert. The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry. London: Faber and Faber, 1968. [1st pub. 194 7]

196 Reiman, Donald H. The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers; Part A, The . New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1972.

Richards, I .A. Coleridge on Imagination. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. [1st pub. 1934)

Richards, I.A. Principles of Literary Criticism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. [1st pub. 1924)

Rousseau, G. S. , ed. Organic Form: The Life of an Idea. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.

Schneider, Elizabeth. Coleridge, Opium and 'Kubla Khan'. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.

Schulz, Max F. The Poetic Voices of Coleridge: A Study of His Desire for Spontaneity and Passion for Order. Revised edition. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964. [1st pub. 1963)

Smith David N., ed. The Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926.

Stone, Alan A. and The Abnormal Personality Through Literature. Sue s., eds. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1966.

Suther, Marshall. The Dark Night of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960.

Suther, Marshall. Visions of Xanadu. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965.

Sutherland, James. A Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry. London: Oxford University Press, 1970. [1st pub. 1948)

Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1961. [1st pub. 1911)

197 Walsh, William. Coleridge, The Work and the Relevance. London: Chatto and Windus, 1973. [1st pub. 1967]

Walsh, William. The Use of Imagination: Educational Thought and the Literary Mind. London: Chatto and Windus, 1959.

Watson, George. Coleridge the Poet. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.

Watson, Lucy E. Coleridge at Highgate. London: Longman's Green and Co., 1925.

Wellek, Rene. A History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950: The Romantic Age. Vol. 2. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965. [1st pub. 1955]

Wellek, Rene and Theory of Literature. London: Jonathan Cape, Warren, Austin. 1953. [1st pub. 1949]

Whitehead, A.N. Science and the Modern World. Lowell lectures 1925. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930. [1st pub. 1926]

Willey, Basil. The Eighteenth Century Background. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1965. [1st pub. 1940]

Willey, Basil. Nineteenth Century Studies. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1969. [1st pub. 1949]

Willey, Basil. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. London: Chatto and Windus, 1972.

Wilson, Colin. Poetry and Mysticism. London: Hutchinson, 1970.

Wilson, Edmund. Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Litera­ ture of 1870-1930. Fontana Library edition. London: Collins, 1969. [1st pub. 1931]

198 Yarlott, Geoffrey. Coleridge and the Abyssinian Maid. London: Methuen, 1967.

SECTION 2: Articles and Essays

Bald, R.C. "Coleridge and The Ancient Mariner." In Nineteenth Century Studies, edited by H.J. Davis et. al. Ithaca, New York: Cornell Univer­ sity Press, 1940.

Barron, David B. "A Study in Symbolism." Psychoanalytic Review 34 (194 7) : 395-431.

Barth, Robert S. "Symbol as Sacrament in Coleridge's Thought." Studies in Romanticism 11 (1972): 320-331.

Bate, Walter J. "Coleridge on the Function of Art." In Perspectives in Criticism, edited by Harry Levin. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1950.

Beres, David. "A Dream, a Vision and a Poem: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Origins of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." International Journal of Psychoanalysis 32 (1951): 97-116.

Boulger, James D. "Coleridge on Imagination Revisited." The Wordsworth Circle 4 (1973): 13-24.

Boulger, James D. "Imagination and Speculation in Coleridge's Conversation Poems." Journal of English and Germanic Philology 64 (1965): 691-711.

Buchan, A.M. "The Sad Wisdom of the Mariner." Studies in in Philology 61 (1964) : 669-688.

Chayes, Irene H. "A Coleridgean Reading of The Ancient Mariner." Studies in Romanticism 4 (1964): 81-103.

199 Callan, Norman. "Augustan Reflective Poetry." In From Dryden to Johnson. The Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 4, edited by Boris Ford. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1966. [1st pub. 1957]

Chandler, Alice. "Structure and Symbol in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Modern Language Quarterly 26 (1965) : 401-413.

Coburn, Kathleen. "The Interpenetration of Man and Nature." Proceedings of the British Academy 49 (1964): 95-113.

Erdman, David V. "Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Wedgwood Fund: Part I, Tom Wedgwood's Master Stroke" and "Part II, Nursery of Genius or School of Nature?" Bulletin of the New York Public Library 60 (1956): 425-443 and 487-507.

Fairchild, H.N. "Hartley, Pistorius and Coleridge." PMLA 62 (1947): 1010-1021.

Gerard, Albert. "Counterfeiting Infinity: 'The Eolian Harp' and the Growth of Coleridge's Mind." Journal of English and Germanic Philology 60 (1961): 411-422.

Gilpin, G.H. "Coleridge and the Spiral of Poetic Thought." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 12 (1972): 639-652.

Gingerich, Solomon F. "From Necessity to Transcendentalism in Coleridge." PMLA 28 (1920): 1-59.

Gose, E.W., Jnr. "Coleridge and the Luminous Gloom." PMLA 75 (1960) : 238-244.

Kahn, S.J. "Psychology in Coleridge's Poetry." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 9 (1951): 208-226.

200 Larsen, Joan. "S.T. Coleridge; His Theory of Knowledge." Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 47 (1958): 221-232.

Little, Geoffrey. " 'Lines Written at Shurton Bars' : Coleridge's First Conversation Poem?" Southern Review 2 (1966) : 137-149.

Lyon, Judson S. "Romantic Psychology and the Inner Senses: Coleridge." PMLA 81 (1966) : 246-260.

Orsini, Gerard N.G. "Coleridge and Schlegel Reconsidered." Comparative Literature 16 (1964): 97-118.

Park, Roy. "Coleridge and Kant: Poetic Imagination and Practical Reason." British Journal of Aesthetics 8 (1968): 335-346.

Pater, Walter. "Coleridge." In Appreciations: With an Essay on Style. London: Macmillan and Company, 1910. [1st pub. 1889]

Prickett, Stephen E. "The Living Educts of the Imagination: Coleridge on Religious Language." The Wordsworth Circle 4 (1973): 99-110.

Rahme , Mary. "Coleridge's Concept of Symbolism." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 9 (1969): 619-632.

Sinclair, Nora R. "Coleridge and Education." Queen's Quarterly 74 (1967): 413-426.

Stempel, Daniel. "Coleridge and Organic Form: The English Tradition.' Studies in Romanticism 6 (1966): 89-97.

Stoll, Elmer E. "Symbolism in Coleridge." PMLA 63 (1948): 214-233.

Sundell, Michael G. "The Theme of Self-Realization in 'Frost at Mid­ night'." Studies in Romanticism 7 (1967): 34-39.

201 Thorpe, Clarence D. "Coleri_dge as Aesthetician and Critic." Journal of the History of Ideas 5 (1944): 387-414.

Ward, Patricia M. "Coleridge's Critical Theory of the Symbol." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 8 (1966) : 15-32.

Warren, Robert Penn. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: A Poem of Pure Imagination; An Experiment in Reading." In Selected Essays. New York: Random House, 1958. [1st pub. 1941]

Whalley, George. "Coleridge and Kant: Two Views of Imagination." In Poetic Process. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953.

Woodring, Carl. "The Mariner's Return." Studies in Romanticism 11 (1972): 375-380.

Yeats, W.B. "The Symbolism of Poetry." In Essays and Intro­ ductions. London: Macmillan, 1961.

Yura, Kimiyoshi. "The Involuntary Memory as Discovered by S.T. Coleridge." Studies in English Literature (English Literary Society of Japan) 42 (1966): 133-143.

202